Field Experience Essay

Although this has been shortly covered in a previous essay, I thought it necessary to explain this experience further: my time as a research assistant at Clemson’s DICE (Data Intensive Computing Environments) lab. This experience has been one of the biggest in my life and quite possibly the one singular experience that concretes my decision to go into computers. Starting in April of 2016 with an offhand question about if I wanted to work on something with my stepdad on computers during the summer, I practically jumped at the chance. After the end of the school year, things began to pick up. I was invited to the lab that my stepdad works in (DICE Lab) to work with him on this project, which was a great honor in and of itself. In this lab,

The process began with basic testing: HPCC (HPC Challenge) benchmark suite on the lab’s resident cluster, the X-wing. This served primarily to iron out some wrinkles in the testing environment and reteach that nothing with computers is easy. Several tests similar to this continued up until the last week of the project, where the final benchmarks and the testing environments were picked; the final benchmarks were as follows: a ping-pong program that measures round-trip time of a packet, a stream test where one node sends a constant stream of packets to another node, measuring send and receive times, a barrier test where one node calls an MPI_Barrier and measures how long it takes for all nodes to synchronize, and seven out of nine benchmarks from the NPB (NAS

The lab was not extremely special, but it had several older desktops, which were slated for the pasture (I managed to get one so I would not have to lug a laptop to and from the lab), Ubuntu, a coffee machine, and a small eight-node cluster in the closet, the X-wing cluster. My stepdad and I were two of about 6 people in the main lab, but there were several offshoots, including Dr. Apon’s (my stepdad’s boss, director of the lab, and member of the NSF) conference room and a mini-conference room for researchers to discuss results. As the week ended, we managed to get the almost-finalized poster submitted for judging, to be either rejected or accepted come September 5th. Come September, my poster was accepted, and edits were made for the camera-ready copy, to be presented at the SC16 Conference in