From June 11 to August 3, in the summer of 2001, a small group of undergraduates from across the United States will meet on the Iowa State University campus for the NSF sponsored REU program on Scientific Computing.
The students will be guided by a set of faculty mentors. The mentors will present scientific research problems, discuss algorithms for solving these problems, and computer programs that implement these algorithms. They will also train the participants in the necessary background in science and programming.
The students will spend their first week getting acquainted with each other, their surroundings, and the goals of the program. There will be an initial series of talks to present the science and computing skills needed.
The students will get to know each other, and practice their skills, by working on a small set of mini_projects involving MATHEMATICA, MATLAB, and graphics. At the end of the first week they will make short presentations on their mini-project results.
The students will then divide into groups, each working with their mentor on a separate large scale project for the rest of the summer:
At the middle of the project, the students will begin writing papers that summarize their projects and results. These papers will be written in LATEX, a language that allows complicated mathematical formulas to be professionally typeset. There will be a short class on LATEX to help the students get started. Some sample documents are available in the Introduction to LATEX. As a test of their skills, the students will carry out a short series of LATEX tasks.
During the summer, the students will visit the "virtual reality cave" at the Virtual Reality Applications Center, the Pat Schnable Laboratory, where gene expression experiments are carried out, similar to the ones that produced data analyzed by the Voronoi project, and the High Performance Computing Group, which has an Origin2000 system, and a parallel workstation farm.
By the end of the project, the mentors will help the students put their papers into final form in LaTeX. You can examine the papers of
The papers may be submitted to an undergraduate journal, such as
There will be a final presentation, at which each student group will present their results, and we will celebrate the conclusion of a summer of hard work and learning.
Last modified on 01 August 2001.