University of New Orleans doctoral student Naw Safrin Sattar, who is specializing in high performance computing, is one of 15 recipients of the 2021 Parallel Computing Summer Research Internship.

The internship with Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is an intense 10-week program aimed at providing students with a solid foundation in modern high performance computing topics integrated with research on real problems encountered in large-scale scientific codes.

“It is a great opportunity to work on real-life computational problems and implement solutions with guidance from mentors with scientific and computational expertise,” Sattar said. “This guidance and the expertise will be very helpful in my Ph.D. dissertation works and my future career. I am looking forward to a great summer ahead.”

Sattar wants to pursue a career in research and education that focuses on high performance computing. She earned a master’s degree in computer science from UNO in 2019 and earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in 2016.

“Since my undergraduate studies, I have been enthusiastic to work with big data and aware that I need to learn and use some technologies,” Sattar said. “High performance computing is one such arena closely related to big data. High performance computing is in demand for analyzing large-scale data that is increasing proportionately with time. Scientists use the advantage of supercomputers to perform the tasks within the shortest possible time.”

The Los Alamos lab is a U.S. Department of Energy Laboratory and a major federally funded research and development center. Sattar will receive a stipend of $12,500 as part of the program.

Sattar will be working on a research project that combines Monte Carlo coding simulations, molecular dynamics and machine learning. Ying Wai Li, deputy team leader of Applied Computer Science’s Future Architectures and Applications Team, will be her mentor.

“I am delighted that Naw is the recipient of this prestigious research award,” said Shaikh Arifuzzaman, assistant professor in the computer science department at the University of New Orleans and Sattar’s doctoral supervisor. “This award is a testimony to the research competitiveness of our doctoral students.”