Colombian undergraduates gain hands-on experience managing supercomputers through ITaP Research Computing

Many students have worked for ITaP Research Computing over the years, but two of the department’s current student workers have traveled a lot farther than most to do so.

Tomás Felipe Llano Ríos and Johan Sebastian Yepes Rios, both undergraduates in computer science at Universidad EAFIT in Medellín, Colombia, and student employees at the university’s Apolo Scientific Computing Center, are spending the academic year learning what goes into running Purdue’s research supercomputers.

Last fall, the students worked for ITaP Research Computing’s high-performance computing services team, where their tasks included helping with the deployment of the new Brown cluster and developing a Hadoop cluster for a Purdue faculty member.

Between unpacking and setting up the many nodes that make up Brown, and learning how to configure and manage a cluster, they’ve gained hands-on experience with both the hardware and software aspects of high-performance computing.

This semester, they’re on the research support team, working more directly with users and helping faculty and students take full advantage of research computing resources. Both say they appreciate the opportunity to work with many people at Purdue and learn about different facets of research computing.

“Our experience here so far has been wonderful,” says Yepes Rios.

“Everyone has been very welcoming,” agrees Llano Ríos. “They’ve told us to ask as many questions as possible, since we’re new and are here to learn and they want to help.”

The students’ internship is the latest partnership in a collaboration between Purdue and Universidad EAFIT when it comes to scientific computing. Hardware from Purdue’s Steele cluster formed the core of EAFIT’s first supercomputer, Apolo I, and when Purdue’s Carter cluster was retired in 2017, it was sold to EAFIT to become part of their new supercomputer.

In 2016, Gerry McCartney, Purdue’s executive vice president for information technology and chief information officer, and Donna Cumberland, ITaP’s executive director of academic computing, visited Universidad EAFIT and learned about some of the science Colombian researchers are doing with Apolo, including designing new drugs to treat HIV and studying seismic activity in order to design buildings that will be better withstand earthquakes.

The two universities have also worked together in Student Cluster Competitions at the annual Supercomputing conference. Llano Ríos and Yepes Rios first got to know ITaP scientific applications analyst Stephen Harrell through their participation in the competition, which Harrell has chaired. They were both members of a 2016 team of Universidad EAFIT students advised by Lev Gorenstein, an ITaP senior scientific applications analyst.

Coming from a major city like Medellín, living in West Lafayette and working on the sprawling Purdue campus has been an adjustment, but both students say they’ve enjoyed having the opportunity to be closer to nature and to attend local events like Feast of the Hunters’ Moon.

Perhaps the biggest element of culture shock has been the climate. But as Llano Ríos notes, “At least the people are warm, even if the weather isn’t.”

Writer:  Adrienne Miller, science and technology writer, Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), 765-496-8204, mill2027@purdue.edu

Last updated: Feb. 16, 2018