Collaborative Research: REU Site: BigDataX: From theory to practice in Big Data computing at eXtreme scales

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This project extends the BigDataX program, a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and the University of Chicago (UChicago). The BigDataX REU site focuses on undergraduate research in both the theory and practice of big data computing at extreme scales. BigDataX includes a diverse group of 10 undergraduate students per year for three years, who will conduct research over a 10-week period in the area of big data and will address problems related to the design, analysis, and implementation of run-time systems and storage systems to support big data applications. The site aims to make extreme scale computing more tractable, touching every branch of computing in high-end computing and data centers. The research advancements will impact scientific discovery, and they will strengthen a wide range of research activities enabling efficient access, processing, storage, and sharing of valuable scientific data from many disciplines. The proposed research projects will place students in the middle of a technological revolution opening doors to many real-world applications. The PIs have a comprehensive and proven educational plan integrating undergraduate students with PhD students with incremental manageable goals, aimed at allowing students to achieve publishable results within the summer program. Furthermore, with an emphasis on recruiting from underrepresented populations, the site will improve the diversity of university faculty, researchers and practitioners in big data and distributed systems.The primary objective of the BigDataX REU site is to promote a data-centric view of scientific and technical computing, at the intersection of distributed systems theory and practice. The site includes six mentors, with complementary expertise from theory to systems, programming languages, distributed systems, storage management, and data science. The mentors have extensive experience in mentoring undergraduate students, collectively having worked with over one hundred undergraduate students in research activities, publishing dozens of peer-reviewed workshop, conference, and journal papers at top venues together with undergraduate students. The students that will be part of the BigDataX program will be exposed to big data applications, large data sets, and various distributed systems such as the Mystic reconfigurable testbed at IIT, Chameleon cloud and the Theta supercomputer (and the upcoming Aurora supercomputer) at Argonne National Laboratory, various NSF-sponsored high performance computing resources, and commercial clouds.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.