RCC staff are supervising two UQ undergraduate students this year—Justin Luong and Joshua O’Brien. The pair are working on very different projects.
RCC Director Prof. David Abramson is supervising Justin Luong, a fifth-year electrical engineering and computer science student, throughout 2018.
Justin is working on high-performance input/output (I/O) caching on a parallel supercomputer. The need for a parallel system which utilises a flash-based cache is motivated by the growing gap between compute performance and I/O performance. With the rise of big data, HPC systems are bottlenecked by I/O performance as a result of slow disk access times compounded by network latencies between the compute and storage nodes.
The parallel filesystem proposed in Justin’s project will greatly improve performance for any application wishing to access data on a compute cluster with locally attached storage. The filesystem is a proof of concept and will be tested on RCC’s FlashLite compute cluster.
“Justin has his head around some pretty sophisticated technology,” said Prof. Abramson. “His project has the potential to make it much easier to use FlashLite, so we are very keen to see how his solution performs.”
RCC eResearch Analysts Dr Marlies Hankel and Dr Minh Dinh are supervising Honours student Joshua O’Brien, a fourth-year software engineering student, for one year from mid-2018 to mid-2019.
Joshua is aiming to deliver a computer program that can import hand-drawn molecular structures, allowing materials scientists to identify different types of atoms (e.g. carbon and nitrogen) and other attributes, such as bond distances. The structures can then be exported into CIF and PDB formats for visualisation and further investigation.
Being able to communicate with researchers outside of the student’s usual field (i.e. comfort zone) is one of the learning outcomes Dr Hankel and Dr Dinh designed for this project. Joshua will work with researchers from UQ’s School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences and the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology. He started on the project less than a month ago.
If you’re an undergraduate student interested in an internship at RCC, please contact: rcc-admin@uq.edu.au.
