JSC Guest Student Programme Proceedings 2016

High-performance computing and simulation are strongly advancing fields in the scientific community. The Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) provides a high-class HPC infrastructure and fosters young scientists willing to enter these domains. Our ten-week guest student program offers interested students the opportunity to work within one of the world’s most powerful HPC environments. Within this programme, students with a major in natural sciences, engineering, computer science or mathematics get the opportunity to familiarize themselves with different aspects of scientific computing. Together with local scientists, the participants work on different topics in research and development. Depending on previous knowledge and on the participant’s interest, the assignment can be chosen out of different areas. These fields include mathematics, physics, chemistry, neuroscience, software development tools, visualization, distributed computing, operating systems and communication. The JSC Guest Student Programme has already been successfully running for 17 years. Since the first programme in 2000, a total of 182 students have seized the opportunity to join research teams from JSC on the Forschungszentrum Jülich campus each summer. Working on challenging scientific projects, they gained experience with modern hardware and software as well as HPC-related methods and algorithms. For many students, the programme has been the foundation for a career in HPC and the basis for fruitful continuing cooperations. The JSC Guest Student Programme 2016 took place from August 1st to October 7th. Once again it was run under the CECAM framework (Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire) with support by IBM Deutschland through a sponsorship within the IBM university relations programme. It targeted students who have already completed their first degree but have not yet finished their master’s course. This year’s announcement yielded a record response of about 100 applications from over 30 different countries. Competition for the available places was especially strong,and after the final selection process, 13 students were invited to Jülich. This publication summarized the findings of these research projects