Tennessee Tech interns take HPC skills to national labs
(From Eagle Drive magazine, February 2025)
A passion for high-performance computing took three Tennessee Tech doctoral students to national laboratories for a summer of experiential learning.
Nicole Avans completed an internship at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., while Evelyn Namugwanya and Grace Nansamba elevated their HPC skill sets at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., in 2024.
What was the best part of your HPC internship?
“It was incredible to experience the culture of New Mexico while developing my confidence as a computer scientist and research software engineer,” Avans said of her time at Sandia National Laboratories. “I met a diverse group of interns and mentors from a variety of places and learned many things in and out of the professional sphere.”
As a computer science intern – a position Avans continued remotely beyond summer – she was involved in research and assisting in the development of the KokkosComm library, a communication framework that optimizes data exchange and parallel processing in distributed computing environments.
“I established a series of performance benchmarks to help illuminate existing issues in this new library and areas for further optimization,” she said.
At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Namugwanya and Nansamba made valuable connections with HPC professionals and peers.
“The entire lab experience was incredible,” Namugwanya said. “Working in person with collaborators, having hands-on access to advanced resources and meeting students from all over the world made the internship truly memorable.”
Namugwanya’s internship provided an opportunity for her to work on the back-end development of a Caliper profiling tool, a performance analysis tool used in HPC environments.
“My team and I introduced a new concept of special region annotations within Caliper, which are essential for profiling HPC benchmarks in the Benchmark Suite,” she said. “This enhancement allows for advanced performance analysis and helps identify specific areas for optimization in HPC applications.”
She said the work was an eye-opener: “Contributing to such a sophisticated HPC tool changed my perspective on the details involved in HPC software and the importance of each component’s efficiency.”
Nansamba, who also interned at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, enjoyed the structured work schedule and said lab employees were supportive to students.
“I worked on performance analysis of the Benchmark Suite for testing HPC systems,” she said, referring to an open collaborative repository for reproducible specifications of HPC benchmarks. “It enables cross-site collaboration on benchmarking by providing a mechanism for sharing reproducible, working specifications.”
Additional highlights for Nansamba included winning a best poster presentation award and making new friends.
What are some important things you learned?
Avans said she gained a better understanding of what it means to relocate for work while she was at Sandia National Laboratories: “It was an immersive learning experience. I had never moved such a long distance, and it was valuable to see what benefits and drawbacks come with relocating for a career opportunity.”
She also valued the numerous educational lectures and presentations.
“The focus was more on continuing education than on production-level software engineering,” she said. “However, on the software engineering side, it was beneficial to become aware of some of my blind spots. I learned many new things about collaborative coding, such as intermediate and advanced use cases of Git and GitHub that are critical in most development careers.”
Namugwanya said her biggest takeaway from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was understanding the critical role of detailed profiling and performance analysis in HPC.
“By implementing special region annotations in Caliper, I learned how precise instrumentation can reveal key insights into computational efficiency within HPC workloads,” she said. “I gained valuable skills in performance tuning, developed a deeper knowledge of data collection in parallel computing environments and gained hands-on experience with advanced profiling techniques. These skills will be valuable for future projects, especially those focused on optimizing complex HPC applications such as collective communication patterns.”
Nansamba learned about the importance of team collaboration to achieve a common goal.
“We had weekly stand-up meetings to give updates about the work, and this was a motivation to finish tasks,” she added. “My team at the lab was pretty fun to work with.”
Avans’ summer internship led to an opportunity to tour Fugaku, a supercomputer focused on energy efficiency at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. She also presented her work at the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing.
What advice do you have for students seeking internships?
Evelyn Namugwanya: “Enjoy the internship experience and stay open to learning. There’s something amazing about putting your academic knowledge into practice, and it’s incredibly fulfilling.”
Grace Nansamba: “It’s possible to get an internship. Inquire from professors whether they can recommend you. It paints a good picture of life after school. It’s exciting!”
Nicole Avans: “Creating and maintaining connections with people in the field through collaborative work and conference attendance will open many doors. If you aren’t involved in any projects, I recommend speaking with your advisor about your desire to get involved. There is almost always more work to be done than people to do it.”