Aman Rani is a Ph.D. student in Mathematics and Statistics at Texas Tech University. She is in the first generation of her family to attend college and the first female from her extended family to leave her hometown of Patiala, India to study. She initially wanted to pursue her doctorate in India, but when she couldn’t find the right advisor for her research, she looked beyond her borders. That initiative and drive brought her to the Sustainable Research Pathways for High-Performance Computing (HPC) program.
“I always sought opportunities to learn Mathematics outside of the regular curriculum,” says Aman. “Both of my advisors here at Texas Tech have worked with National Labs and encouraged me to apply to SRP.”
SRP-HPC is designed to connect students and faculty with National Laboratory scientists to encourage lasting collaborations and jump start careers. Last summer, Aman worked at Berkeley Lab with Dr. Xiaoye Sherry Li, Senior Scientist in the Computational Research Division, and Dr. Yang Liu, a junior Research Scientist, on developing new strategies to optimize accelerator modeling code. The particle accelerator at Berkeley Lab has a number of special parameters needed to tune the accelerator to operate at optimal speed at full capacity. Aman and Drs. Li and Liu set out to deploy an auto-tuner called “GPTune” to search for the best parameters.
“I feel much more confident now about the National Labs. The other researchers at Berkeley Lab will take the initiative to start interactions with you and encourage you,” says Aman. “This has motivated me to gain more experience with HPC and possibly pursue this as a career.”
The SRP experience benefited the Lab staff as much as it did Aman. Dr. Li notes that the questions Aman was unafraid to ask helped the team make progress. In addition, Dr. Yang Liu gained valuable leadership experience by taking the technical supervision role of the students. “In the past, he didn’t have the opportunity of doing this as a main leader,” says Dr. Li. “But last summer, I let Dr. Liu lead all the technical aspects of this research, and the outcome was very good.”
The team had a poster accepted at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC22), the leading conference in their field. While the team is wrapping up their work for SC22, they are hoping to work together again.
In the meantime, Aman is serving in the Association for Women in Mathematics student chapter at Texas Tech and encouraging her undergraduate Calculus students to pursue research experiences like SRP. “I explain how this experience helped me grow both professionally and personally,” says Aman. “I am thankful to SRP-HPC for broadening my horizons.”