Hi! My name is Iván Jiménez and I am a senior Computer Science undergrad at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus (UPRRP). Through the UPRRP’s Increasing Diversity in Interdisciplinary Big Data to Knowledge (IDI-BD2K) program, I was able to participate in the Internship in Biomedical Research, Informatics and Computer Science (iBRIC) during this summer. I worked with Alexander Ropelewski at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We worked in collaboration with the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) of the University of Pittsburgh on our project titled “Optimizing High Performance Big Data Cancer Workflows”. The project consisted of running cancer workflows on different file systems of PSC’s new supercomputer: Bridges. We optimized these workflows in terms of execution timings and memory usage and then produced recommendations for future use of programs on each file system.
I also had the chance to develop a project poster and present it at the annual Duquesne Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium at Duquesne University. Our work has been recently accepted for publishing as a student paper for the Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC-2017) conference.
Apart from work, one of the best highlights of my summer was touring the PSC, UPitt and Carnegie Mellon campuses and buildings with my fellow interns. The list of awesome activities we did as a group is too long to mention in this summary so I’ll just include the schedule we tried to follow throughout the internship.
Thanks to the IDI-BD2K program, I will never forget fun I had while meeting new people, eating lots of pizza and learning about Bioinformatics and High Performance Computing.