HPC Ph.D. Fellowship Program

The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), IEEE Computer Society and SC Conference series have established the High Performance Computing (HPC) Ph.D. Fellowship Program. Every year, up to three fellowship recipients will each receive a stipend of at least $5,000 (U.S.) for one academic year, plus travel support to attend the SC conference.

Submissions for the 2008 HPC Ph.D. Fellowship are now open at https://submissions.supercomputing.org/. The deadline for submissions, including all supporting materials, is September 8, 2008. Note that this is earlier than in the past!

The fellowship seeks to help address the important issue of training the next generation of HPC scientists and engineers. Over the past several years, multiple reports, including the High End Computing Revitalization Task Force’s “Federal Plan for High-End Computing” and the National Research Council’s study, “Getting Up to Speed: The Future of Supercomputing,” have noted the need to have a highly trained cadre of HPC scientists and engineers.

The National Research Council’s 2005 study, “Getting Up to Speed,” specifically recommends, “While it is important to keep senior professionals in the field [of supercomputing], it is also important to continue to produce next-generation professionals. Funding models that encourage and support the education of the next generation, as well as those that provide the supercomputing infrastructure needed for their education, are necessary. It is also important that students preparing for a career in high-performance computing have confidence that attractive employment opportunities will continue to exist.”

“The ACM/IEEE-CS HPC Ph.D. Fellowship Program is designed to directly address this recommendation by honoring exceptional Ph.D. students throughout the world with the focus areas of high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis,” wrote Bill Kramer, general manager of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Kramer served as general chair of the SC05 Conference, which set record-breaking attendance and exhibit figures, generating extra funds to endow the fellowship. “The ACM/IEEE-CS HPC Ph.D. Fellowship Program also supports our longstanding commitment to workforce diversity and encourages nominations of women, members of underrepresented groups and all who contribute to diversity.”

As defined by the fellowship eligibility guidelines, HPC covers the areas of computational sciences, computational engineering and computer science using the most powerful computers available at a given time.

Students must be nominated by a full-time faculty member at a Ph.D. granting institution. They must be enrolled in full-time Ph.D. programs at accredited colleges or universities, and they should have completed at least one year of study in their doctoral programs at the time of their nominations. Fellowship recipients will be selected based on:

• Their overall potential for research excellence
• The degree to which their technical interests align with those of the HPC community
• Their academic progress to date, as evidenced by publications and endorsements from their faculty advisor and department head as well as a plan of study to enhance HPC-related skills
• Demonstration of their anticipated use of HPC resources