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CS students take day-trip to Oak Ridge National Lab
On April 6th two capstone classes on high-performance computing, along with Professor Phil Pfeiffer and CS staff member David Robinson, went on a day-trip to Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The students made the trip to get a better understanding of what can be achieved with the help of high-performance computing and to observe some of the fastest machines in the world.
Bobby Whitten and Mitch Griffith, alumni of the CS Department and now employed by ORNL, led the students through various sections of the National Lab, which inclulded a short lecture on ORNL's historic Graphite Reactor.
Whitten and Griffith are not new to the Lab: as ETSU students, they previously worked on a collaborative project, the Resource Allocation and Tracking System (RATS), and were involved in the design and implementation of the system which tracks computer usage. The project was a joint effort between Dr. Phil Pfeiffer, his students and ORNL employees.
Another reason for the trip was historical: Oak Ridge has a rich past that few students are aware of, including the production of the nuclear material that went into the atomic bomb in 1942. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is one of the first sites involved in nuclear materials production that marked the beginning of the atomic age. The group also stopped at a public park on the premises of the National Lab to visit a bell brought from Nagasaki in 1996, which symbolizes the now peaceful coexistence between Japan and the US.
Besides sightseeing and learning, students went to the National Lab to learn about working conditions and employment opportunities. One HPC student, Steve Fritts, has since applied for an internship in Mitch's group. This was the first trip that ETSU Computer Science students have taken to the National Lab.Professor Pfeiffer hopes to repeat the trip with future classes to raise awareness of ORNL's work in scientific and high performance computing.
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An article By Monica Năstase of Emerging Technology Center (ETC)
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