The NSF-funded REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) Site program at UMBC: Online Interdisciplinary Big Data Analytics in Science and Engineering is accepting applications. It is a purely online program open to students from the entire nation. The 8-week program will include training in fundamentals of HPC software (MPI) and productivity tools (SLURM) on large distributed-memory clusters with CPUs and GPUs as well as Data Analytics applications like Tensorflow, Keras, PyTorch, and Horovod. Each student will be paid a stipend of $5,600 for participation and provided with opportunities to present their work at conferences. We are looking for students from all STEM disciplines and particularly also for students who are interested in gaining Big Data, HPC, and application experience.
More information can be found at https://bigdatareu.umbc.edu and the PDF flyer there. The application is by 03/01/2026 using the NSF ETAP system. The two project topics planned are (1) Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Research for Earth Applications; (2) Machine Learning in Real-Time Imaging for Medical Imaging. Both projects are in partnership with outside collaborators to give an interdisciplinary research experience. The program is online to enable participation of students who might not be free to travel and is in teams for a collaborative research experience. Each team is supported by a dedicated graduate assistant and will publish a technical report in the HPCF Tech. Rep. series. Every team in past years has additionally published at least a conference paper.