Summer Internships at the APAC National Facility at the ANU

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The Summer Internship program is largely aimed at local students who are already resident in Canberra. Successful applicants from interstate would be expected to make their own arrangements for travel and accommodation.

Candidates are encouraged to submit applications by 30 October, after which date we will begin to match people to available projects. Later applications will also be considered. Students who are interested in applying should contact Ben Evans
Phone 6125 3437
Email ben.evans@anusf.anu.edu.au

Applications: Please provide a brief resume and give details of your experience and interests in areas related to high performance computing. Please also indicate the dates for which you would be available.

Examples areas of projects suitable for Summer Interns (2006/2007) are as follows:

• Large Data Management

  The APAC National Facility manages a large data system servicing over 60 large scale data projects in the physical sciences, humanities and social sciences. Applications include astronomy, gravitational waves, earth systems, GIS, complex materials, audio and video and various areas of social science collections. The system also provides large data management for large computational models generated through the National facility. This summer project is to work in the team supporting the data system with the aim of using cluster based technologies to develop software and services for data applications as well as furthering the technologies for making this data available. This includes management issues such as data management through global and heirarchical filesystems, clustered relational databases and other system management concerns. It also includes developing some of the application support for the system and services that may run from these systems such as web interfaces, data transfers and streaming services. Relevant links include:
  

  • software systems on the Data System at the National Facility
  • NF Mass Data storage System
  • workflow management
  • Ruby on Rails, apache services
  • mysql, postgres and schema design
  • GIS related services
  • SRB, OpenDAP

• Grid R&D

  The facility participates in the APAC Grid, a production grid service across Australian advanced computational infrastructure include HPC, data facilities, and programming interfaces into this infrastructure. There are some opportunities to participate in some projects related to this technology, in particular to further develop the access and transfer of data from the system. Activities may include implementing REST, WSDL and SOAP services, or other ways to integrate remote and local services. A key area is consider the ways to integrate local or remote identity providers in the current services. Technologies include:

  • globus
  • Shibboleth identity
  • pubcookie
  • GridFTP

• Performance Tracking Tools

  The facility supports a range of HPC codes and packages on both the peak HPC system and the data systems. This project is to work on a suite of analysis programs that has been developed to track in near real-time the performance and resource utilisation of the computational programs and provide historical searches through that data. This application has been adopted by all APACs systems as a single interface for tracking resource utilisation. In addition the ANU is developing modules for tracking the utilisation of its data cluster. This includes database analysis, data analysis software, large data management through tape robots, and wide area transfers across the APAC data grid. Some (minimal) public interfaces to these applications can be found on

  • Scope (public)
  • data transfers

• Climate Modelling

  The APAC National Facility supports many scientific grand challenge applications, including climate modelling and simulation of other complex systems. Some of these systems -- called coupled models -- comprise multiple mutually interacting subsystem models (e.g.atmosphere, ocean, sea-ice and land models in a coupled climate model). We are currently involved in both the development and ongoing user support of coupled models. In particular, we are contributing to the Australian Community Climate Earth System Simulator (ACCESS) project. Intern project opportunities include model performance evaluation and tuning, software quality enhancement to prepare models for integration into coupled systems, implementation of coupling mechanisms, and analysis of coupled model output. Technologies include:

  • Parallel computing using MPI and OpenMP
  • Scientific programming using Fortran
  • Weather forecasting and climate models