Earlier this month, ten high school students from the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts and their mentor Brad Burkman, attended the Oklahoma Supercomputing Symposium. With “Blinky”, their LittleFe in tow, the Accelerating Science Group gave a poster and talk during the two-day symposium,

What did these high school students present?

A group of researchers at Louisiana State University had asked Burkman’s Accelerating Science Group to optimize multiplication of dense unstructured small-to-medium thin rectangular matrices ( ~ 30x10^4).  Armed with a combined knowledge of C++, OpenMP, MPI and an understanding of data structures and making extensive use of the Blue Waters Undergraduate Petascale Education materials, Henry Niemen’s "Supercomputing in Plain English," (SIPE) and LONI and XSEDE remote training, the students eagerly began their research.

The project tested the storage hierarchy on different computers.  The students took the Blue Waters UPEP "Matrix Multiplication with CUDA" code, looped it for different size matrices, and graphed the time per operation.  Each computer had different results, but all showed rather constant time up until a rather quick degradation at a certain matrix size.

The Symposium talks were aimed at a wide audience, rather than a technical audience, which was perfect for attendees of all ages. Said one student, “I had expected the talks to be over my head, but with my knowledge base, I was able to understand most of what was being discussed. Burkman says, “ This comment inspired me to think that this group, and groups like it, can actually do HPC work, rather than just play with it.”

Back at the poster session, as the students placed Blinky next to their poster, a crowd began to form.. It was definitely an exciting conclusion to a wonderful experience for ten bright  and motivated high school students.

The slides from the students' talk can be found at http://symposium2012.oscer.ou.edu/speakers.html#accelerating. The students’ poster can be found at https://sites.google.com/a/lsmsa.edu/accelerating-science-group/.