Blue Waters Graduate Fellowship for Sean Seyler | About | Beckstein Lab

Graduate student Sean Seyler was awarded a 2016 Blue Waters Graduate Fellowship. The Blue Waters Graduate Fellowship Program is funded by the National Science Foundation and lets graduate students from across the country immerse themselves in a year of focused high-performance computing (HPC) and data-intensive research using the Blue Waters supercomputer to accelerate their research. The fellowship will enable Sean to run simulations on this machine and carry out a project that he designed and proposed: “Developing a hybrid continuum-particle method for simulating large-scale heterogeneous biomolecular systems”.

Sean will be provided with a full year of support, including a $38,000 stipend and up to $12,000 in tuition allowance, and funds to support travel to a Blue Waters-sponsored symposium. Importantly, as a 2016 Blue Waters Graduate Fellow, he also receives an allocation for computing time (50,000 node-hours) on the powerful Blue Waters petascale computing system. Blue Waters is the largest supercomputer housed on a university campus (at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and is one of the largest and fastest supercomputers in the country that is available for academic research. It can sustain a performance of over 13 petaflops and contains over 390,000 AMD Bulldozer cores and over 4,000 NVIDIA Kepler GPU accelerators.

Blue Waters Supercomputer. Image Copyright © 2013 NCSA. All rights reserved. Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Blue Waters supercomputer opened on March 28, 2013.