NSF Awards Grant for Cutting-Edge Digital Genomics, Quantum Computing, and Supercomputer Studies at ORU

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has issued a supplemental award of $16,000 to ORU's recently awarded effort: GIRESS CC* (GPU Infrastructure for Research, Education, and Student Success - Campus Cyberinfrastructure program). This brings the total GIRESS award to $415,382. This supplemental award is for REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) activity in the first year of the GIRESS two-year project. Five students will be selected to work on the following efforts: research in digital genomics, quantum computing algorithms, and supercomputer administration and user support. Dr. Wheat is the Principal Investigator and Drs. Andrew Lang, Julianna Goelzer, and Jan Woerner are co-Principal Investigators for the GIRESS project. The work is expected to begin when the Spring'23 semester commences.

Starting from their first week as REU interns, the students will be fully immersed and included in the PI's research groups and will be partnered with other faculty and graduate research assistants. The REU students will participate fully in research group meetings and the discussion of relevant research papers. In addition, the students will receive appropriate tasks, such as evaluating and testing prototypes, developing algorithms, and experimenting with HPC hardware and middleware.

One of the REU students will be focused on HPC/AI systems administration, user engagement, project enablement, and faculty teaming. This student will also focus on the configuration and facilitation of Qiskit (Quantum Computing simulator) environments to support those doing Qiskit-enabled algorithm development. This student's research area will also focus on a quantum computing algorithm effort.

The other REU students will be focused on bioinformatics efforts for whole genome homology and for RNA sequence differentiation.

The students will learn about the project's goals, research issues in parallel computing, and existing research in the field. Simultaneously, the students will identify relevant improvements that they want to address in their respective projects. The students will work out a plan together with the PI and graduate students on how to effect enhancements and evaluate and validate their experiments. The students will carry out well-defined sub-tasks in high-performance computing, middleware, heterogeneous architectures, and innovation.

The REU students will be encouraged to work on an undergraduate honors thesis and present their work at research meetings. It is anticipated that the students' work will result in artifacts available for general use, GitHub code samples, and refereed publications. All will help prepare the students for graduate-level research or jobs in related areas.

It is expected that the participating students will be majors in either Computer Science or one of the Biochemistry disciplines.

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Oral Roberts University

alang@oru.edu

Oral Roberts University's Computing & Mathematics Department Offers Undergraduate and Graduate Degrees in Computer Science, Computer Information Technology, Data Science, Applied Science, and Mathematics.

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