Apply for the Undergraduate program here.

Apply for the Graduate program here.

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Students can use the internship experience to receive credit through their college or university if their institution has an independent study class or internship credit program. On the application form, students should indicate their intent to use the internship to satisfy requirements for university credits. The course/program number (if applicable) and description will be requested, and paperwork will need to be processed at the beginning and end of the internship.

Six internship placements will be available at TACC during summer 2023!

The program will run from June 5 – August 4, 2023.

Experience at a Glance
The enriching and transformative experience at a world-class supercomputing center includes:

• Opportunities to train in Software Engineering, Science Gateways, and High Performance Computing
• Mentoring by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin
• Social and team-building activities
• Professional and leadership development opportunities
• Technical report and publication opportunities

Stipend  
Participants will receive a $5,400 stipend, housing (+ meal card) at The University of Texas at Austin, and travel arranged by TACC. Additionally, travel grants to present research at an annual conference will be available to selected participants.

Apply
Summer 2023 SGX3 Student Program Application

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The dashboard, a collaboration between the University of Hawaiʻi, DOH and 14 partner organizations from across the state, was released in October. UH Associate Director of Cyberinfrastructure Sean Cleveland and his team, as a part of the Hawaiʻi Data Science Institute, built this new substance use disorder and mental health dashboard.

It displays Hawaiʻi’s current behavioral health trends in drug overdose, polysubstance abuse, co-occurring substance use and mental health disorders. The ongoing collaboration between UH and DOH will include more available datasets, updates to usability, accessibility and improved mobile support. Stakeholder meetings will also be held to collect feedback on the dashboard’s design and features.

“This behavioral health dashboard is of importance to Hawaiʻi because it promotes the use of public health surveillance data to improve interventions for substance use and mental disorders. Also, this dashboard provides information to the healthcare community and non-profit groups that support those who experience and/or are in recovery from these conditions, along with their ʻohana,” said Principal Investigator Treena Becker, a researcher at the Center on Aging in UH Mānoa’s Thompson School of Social Work and Public Health.

The project was funded by an almost $4.4-million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Overdose Data to Action aimed at expanding public health surveillance to allow for high quality, timely and comprehensive data collection for drug-related misuse and overdose morbidity and mortality and using these data to drive prevention strategies.

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The NIH program at John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii at Manoa supports undergraduates and graduates in a Biomedical, Health and Biology-related program to expand their awareness, and skill set, into Data Science techniques, methods and projects. View the flyer for more details.

Apply for the scholarship here

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“KoaStore will help support and power UH investigators’ research through its high-performance, large size and fast connection to the rest of the world. Further, KoaStore will help enable analysis of data at a scale not previously possible on the Mana high performance computing cluster, allowing larger simulations and discovery,” said Sean Cleveland, principal investigator and associate director of cyberinfrastructure at UH Information Technology Services.

KoaStore will be integrated into the UH high performance computing cluster Mana and focus on supporting research in the areas of astronomy, atmospheric science, climate science, microbiome and computer and data science.

Serving national and local research

The new platform will also serve the national research community through partnership with the Open Science Data Federation, leveraging existing UH, Pacific region and national high-speed research networks. This partnership federates national computing resources to offer high-speed storage and shorter wait-times on shared compute resources for UH researchers.

“The public datasets hosted on KoaStore will make it possible for researchers in Hawaiʻi, across the nation and around the world to use astronomy data produced by the UH Institute for Astronomy (IfA),” said Curt Dodds, IT manager at IfA and KoaStore co-investigator. “We plan to share data from cosmological simulations, a dynamic database of the entire night sky, and machine learning models of the Sun’s atmosphere and distant galaxies.”

Data from the Stereographically Projected Cosmological Simulations, also known as StePS, a novel astrophysics simulation method, are an example of public datasets available for download through KoaStore.

KoaStore will be integrated with the NSF Jetstream2 cloud computing infrastructure and allow researchers to easily span cloud computing environments to support new deep learning and artificial intelligence workflows, visualization and applications.

Additionally, the platform will aid hands-on training in data and computational science for the next generation of researchers and data scientists through a partnership with the Hawaiʻi Data Science Institute and local community to provide workshops and classroom access.

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UH is part of a newly available national cloud computing resource that allows researchers to access powerful cloud-based environments on demand to explore and understand immense amounts of data from a laptop or tablet.

The NSF supported project Jetstream2 is an update to the widely used Jetstream cloud computing system. Jetstream2 provides eight petaFLOPS of virtual supercomputing power, allowing researchers to simplify data analysis, boost scientific discovery and leverage artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

“A 1 petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) computer system is capable of performing one quadrillion (1015) floating-point operations per second. The rate 1 PFLOPS is equivalent to 1,000 TFLOPS. To match what a 1 PFLOPS computer system can do in just one second, you’d have to perform one calculation every second for 31,688,765 years,” according to Indiana University.

“Our participation in Jetstream2 ensures our researchers, faculty and students have access to a national-scale cloud computing resource platform to effectively collaborate with their peers and research partners and leverage state-of-the-art technology and techniques to drive science forward,” said Garret Yoshimi, UH vice president for information technology services. “We are grateful to NSF for their generous support in making Jetstream2 a reality for our UH community.”

Related: UH part of $10M cloud computing coalition, June 4, 2020

With five computational systems, Jetstream2 spans the nation with partners at UH, Indiana University, Arizona State University, Cornell University and the Texas Advanced Computing Center. The system is designed to be easily used by researchers who have limited experience with cloud computing and to serve smaller academic communities with no previous access to such resources.

The 24/7 user-friendly cloud computing environment provides virtual infrastructure that allows for more access to high-end technologies that enable deep learning and AI techniques. The Jetstream2 system is easy to expand and reconfigure and supports diverse modes of on-demand access. In addition, it extends a broad range of hardware and services that include larger and faster storage systems, graphics processing units, large memory nodes, virtual clusters and much more.

Jetstream2 also supports experimentation and teaching. The system will serve more students than any other NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure resource, better equipping them to fully participate in the evolving STEM workforce.

Additional partnerships with the University of Arizona, Johns Hopkins University and University Corporation for Atmospheric Research will contribute to Jetstream2’s unparalleled usability and support for a broad range of scientific efforts.

Researchers may request several allocation types through NSF’s Xtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment.

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“As one of the few universities to offer botany undergraduate and graduate degrees, botanists from UH Mānoa have a strong history of participation at BSA meetings,” said Associate Professor Kasey Barton. “Attending the annual BSA meeting gives students, postdocs and faculty members the opportunity to interact with our colleagues from around the world, hear about new science and participate in workshops about critical issues in academia, such as diversity and inclusion, education and research approaches.” Kasey Barton is also on the Change HI research team.

Barton presented a talk on salinity tolerance of Hawaiʻi‘s native coastal dune plants, which are threatened by sea-level rise. It was part of the symposium “From High Islands to the Ocean Floor: Pacific Island Plants at the Extreme,” which was organized by UH Mānoa graduate students Ana Flores (PhD candidate) and Scott Van De Verg (recent MS graduate). According to Barton, it is rare for graduate students to organize a symposium at an international meeting like this, and to also secure funding to support the speakers in the symposium is really impressive.

PhD candidate Veronica Gibson delivered two talks on macroalgal physiological ecology under submarine groundwater discharge conditions and biocultural values of groundwater dependent ecosystems. Gibson said that after being unable to attend in-person events over the past years due to the pandemic, attending conferences in this last year of her PhD has been pivotal to networking and making connections for post-doctoral opportunities and future collaborations.

“It was really interesting to learn how I have grown as a scientist over the past two years, and really found my place in studying tropical marine ecosystems and social ecological systems,” Gibson said.

Botany leaders recognized with national award

Assistant Professor Karolina Heyduk was part of a team that organized a colloquium titled “Tackling Coloniality in Plant Sciences: Legacies and Paths Forward.” They had an international group of invited speakers who gave talks on the history and ongoing influence of Western/European and colonialist practices on plant science, ways to change how we think about systems of knowledge and ways to repair the damage done to Indigenous peoples and land.

Heyduk, who is also the director of the Joseph F. Rock Herbarium, housed in the School of Life Sciences, was the 2022 recipient of the BSA Emerging Leader Award, which is given annually to one scholar in the country who has displayed outstanding accomplishments and has demonstrated exceptional promise for future accomplishments in research, education, public policy and exceptional service to the professional botanical community. UH Mānoa Assistant Professor Christopher Muir, who organized a workshop at the BSA annual conference, won the award in 2020.

Other participants from UH Mānoa included Feresa Corazon Cabrera (PhD student, School of Life Sciences), McKenna Bonn-Savage (recent BS graduate presenting her undergraduate research), Ed McAssey (instructor, School of Life Sciences) and Carrie Tribble (National Science Foundation post-doctoral fellow, School of Life Sciences).

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