Data Heroes Summer Internship Program

Who are the Data Heroes?

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is offering data science graduate students and advanced undergraduate students like you the opportunity to become LLNL Data Heroes — interns who get to work on real problems that really matter to our country.

This is a flexible summer internship program that runs from June 8 to August 21, 2015. As one of our Data Heroes, you'll take your ideas, passion, and the skills you've acquired in Machine Learning, Statistics and High Performance Computing and apply them to projects in areas of National Importance.

The Laboratory's science and engineering are being applied to achieve breakthroughs for counterterrorism and nonproliferation, defense and intelligence, energy and environmental security. The program for the summer of 2015 anticipates bringing in a cohort of 12–15 science and engineering graduate students with backgrounds in machine learning, applied mathematics, computer science, or statistics.

The availability of massive amounts of data, along with high-resolution models enabled by High Performance Computers, will help us better understand how power production is related to atmospheric variables (such as wind speed and turbulence) across a broad range of spatial and temporal scales and in widely varying geographic areas. This understanding will be used to optimize power production from wind farms and to improve the fidelity of forecasting models that relate power output to atmospheric conditions.

You'll work with our Staff Scientists on high-impact problems

At the beginning of the program, you'll be paired with one of our mentors — LLNL staff scientists and engineers who are recognized experts in their fields. Your mentor will develop a purposed research project for you that will be significant, yet manageable within the length of the Data Heroes Program. Some of these projects will be designed to lead to follow-on work for Data Heroes who would like to return in subsequent years. A few of our mentors and their projects include:

Brenda Ng — Data Science Tools for Rapid Data Stream Analysis — In this project, we will study tools for the rapid analysis of x-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) data streams, which can be used to accelerate our understanding of the structure and dynamics of high-energy-density (HED) matter.

Kristin Lennox — Determining Typical Weather Pattern Descriptors for Large Cities — To inform a software tool used by emergency response managers, this project will seek to determine what the correct "typical" weather descriptors for large cities should be by developing and accessing various clustering methods on a historical weather data set.

Karl Wilhelmsen — Upgrading Image Processing Code Used in the National Ignition Facility (NIF) — Students working on this project will be upgrading existing image processing code used in the automatic alignment of NIF lasers. The code's original author, physicist Charles Orth, will be available to assist.

Data Heroes will have access to supercomputing resources including Catalyst and Surface (for GPU processing)

High-performance computing has been a central strength of the Laboratory—vital to mission success and a source for scientific discovery and technological innovation. Catalyst computing nodes include 128 gigabytes of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) per node and 800 gigabytes of non-volatile memory (NVRAM). It is particularly well suited to solving big data problems, such as those found in the areas of bioinformatics, graph networks, machine learning, and natural language processing. Surface computing nodes include dual 8-core Xeon processors and NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPUs. Surface is well suited for applications that can leverage the parallel GPU cores.

What else does a Data Hero do?

In addition to individual project work with your mentor, you'll be able to participate in Data Hero seminars and short courses, such as:

Big data analysis using Spark
Deep Learning with Caffe
Practical data analysis with R

Every Hero loves a challenge! You'll get to participate in the Data Heroes Challenge Cup, where teams of Data Heroes will compete to build the best data analysis system! You'll also have opportunities to tour some of LLNL's unique facilities, such as the National Ignition Facility, the Terascale computing facility, and the Additive Manufacturing facility.

Besides fascinating project work, the Data Heroes program will offer relevant seminars, short courses, and tours of LLNL's world-class research facilities.

Do you have what it takes to be an LLNL Data Hero?

Check to see if you qualify for this exciting opportunity!

Applying to the Summer 2016 Data Heroes program at LLNL:

If you are interested in applying for the Summer 2016 Data Heroes program, please send the following information to Jim Gansemer and Ghaleb Abdulla.

Current resume
Cover letter describing your background, interests and career goals and why you are interested in the Data Heroes program

We will review your resume and if there is a good match, you will be contacted. Unfortunately, due to the high volume of interest we may not be able to respond to each applicant individually.