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News Release

NSF REU students gain hands-on science experience working on Aristotle Cloud Federation project


Contact: Paul Redfern
Cell: (607) 227-1865

FOR RELEASE: November 2, 2018

ITHACA, NY – NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) students made significant contributions to Aristotle Cloud Federation science use case projects in the summer of 2018 while advancing their knowledge of domain sciences and cloud computing. Their hands-on work experience at Cornell University and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) focused on modeling, data analysis, and the enhancement of job duration and serverless computing tools.

Three undergraduates participated in the REU experiences at Cornell. Plato Deliyannis implemented a flexible radio astronomy pipeline architecture and coded a friend-of-friends algorithm; Cindy Wu wrote a script to construct multiple species microbial community models and code to analyze the exchange reactions; and, Peter Cook analyzed the operating conditions for wind turbines and wrote scripts to analyze Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) models using statistical methods. Cook also learned how to employ parallel computing for efficiency.

Aristotle science use case lead Adam Brazier worked with these students to ensure that they were well integrated into their science teams, and learning from and contributing to the science team’s goals. He was impressed by the student’s diligence and the resulting contributions that they made.

In addition, two undergraduate students participated in the REU experiences at UCSB. They were mentored by Aristotle co-PI and UCSB computer science professor Rich Wolski. William Berman worked on DrAFTS, a cloud spot pricing analysis tool, and Gareth George, revamped the DrAFTS data management infrastructure and analyzed changes in AWS spot pricing. George is now engaged in developing a portable version of AWS Lambda so that science applications that use Lambda can be executed in remote locations. AWS Lambda is an event-driven, serverless computing platform that runs code in response to events.

The Aristotle project team is grateful to the NSF for sponsoring these student experiences. Special thanks to the research professors and staff who took the time to teach and mentor the students.

The Aristotle Cloud Federation project – https://federatedcloud.org – is supported by National Science Foundation grant #1541215 and the Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing (CAC) in partnership with the University at Buffalo Center for Computational Research (CCR) and the University of California, Santa Barbara Department of Computer Science.

The Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program – https://www.nsf.gov/crssprgm/reu/ – supports active research participation by undergraduate students in any of the areas of research funded by the National Science Foundation.