A multi-cultural success story for achieving diversity in multi-core/many-core internships

Abstract

One of the foremost challenges in high performance computing (HPC) is promoting involvement of historically underrepresented undergraduate students. The Blue Waters Undergraduate Petascale Education Program, funded by the National Science Foundation Office of CyberInfrastructure, has been facing this challenge head-on while supporting undergraduate internship experiences that involve the application of HPC to problems in the sciences, engineering, or mathematics. This paper describes an evolving approach to the recruitment efforts for undergraduate interns and mentors that demonstrates the importance of formative assessment supporting proactive program changes leading to success in generating a large, diverse applicant pool including substantial numbers of qualified women and minority candidates.