Past Activities

Provided below is a list of educational programs and activities carried out by the Blue Waters project.


Webinars (2017 — 2019)

Blue Waters provided a series of free webinars. All of the sessions were broadcast on Youtube and were recorded for free public access. Details about each session including abstracts, presenters, intended audience, and prerequisites are provided with the corresponding track summaries at https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/webinars.


Petascale Institutes (2017, 2019)

Blue Waters collaborated with national organizations to prepare participants to scale simulations and data analytics programs to petascale-class computing systems in support of computational and data-enabled discovery for all fields of study. Video recordings of the presentations along with slides and exercises are freely available at: https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/petascale-computing-2019.


Hackathons (2015, 2018)

Blue Waters conducted Hackathons as multi-day coding events in which teams of developers ported their applications and optimize their applications to run more efficiently on petascale class systems. Each team worked alongside mentors to improve the performance of their research codes, while also preparing their team members to be more proficient at scaling simulations and data analytics programs to petascale-class computing systems in support of discovery for all fields of study.


Internships (2009 — 2019)

The Blue Waters Internship program focused on motivating and training the next generation of supercomputing researchers. The program included support for undergraduate internship activities at accredited degree granting institutions in the United States. Students and faculty who were members of groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM were strongly encouraged to participate in the program. Interns submitted articles about their research for publication in the Journal of Computational Science Education, described below.


Graduate Fellowships (2014 — 2019)

Blue Waters Graduate Fellowships provided PhD students with a year of support, including a stipend, tuition allowance, an allocation of node-hours on the Blue Waters computing system, and travel funds to attend a Blue Waters Symposium to present research.


Online Graduate Courses (2014 — 2015)

The Blue Waters project provided online graduate-level courses, which were offered for credit to students at institutions across the country with the participation of local faculty members.

Past courses included: