Tabitha Samuel, the deputy director and operations group leader for UT’s National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), helped author a paper that was recognized as the most impactful at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing Conference July 21-25 in Providence, Rhode Island.
The paper, “BRICCs: Building Pathways to Research Cyberinfrastructure at Under Resourced Institutions,” examines ways that two-year colleges could use computing to help maintain growth. The Building Research Innovation at Community Colleges (BRICCs) is a collaborative effort across colleges throughout the country to creatively advance computing and network efforts.
Samuel’s group received the Phil Andrews Award, a recognition given to a top academic paper at the conference. The Phil Andrews award carries special meaning to UT because it’s named for the late Phil Andrews, a former founding-director of the NICS. Andrews, a renaissance man who powerlifted and wrote poetry, was a pioneer in advanced computing infrastructure for more than 25 years.
The BRICCs paper, which has a goal of finding ways to engage under-resourced institutions and students in research computing, was also awarded as the top paper in the category of workforce development, training, diversity, and education. It was funded through a $250,000 National Science Foundation grant.
Samuel was a co-author with Dhruva Chakravorty (Texas A&M), Honggao Liu (Texas A&M), Wesley A. Brashear (Texas A&M), Sarah Janes (San Jacinto College), Ralph Zottola (University of Alabama at Birmingham), Fidelis Ngang (Houston Community College), Stephen Miller (Eastern New Mexico University), and Lisa M. Perez (Texas A&M).
“The paper being recognized as the most impactful at the conference is really awesome. While this is a technical conference on research cyberinfrastructure, it also thankfully realizes the equal importance of workforce development and training—areas that people usually think are the secondary, tertiary things,” Samuel said. “The other rewarding piece for me is that Phil Andrews was the founding director of NICS, so it felt like I was bringing something back home.”
Extending the Work
Samuel was recently named a co-principal investigator on a $200,000 NSF award – BRICCs – Establishing Pathways for Regional Computing that will prolong the BRICCs study to reach more institutions. Among other actions, the project will promote collaborations across universities and colleges, analyze implementations of collaborative research computing models, help share cyberinfrastructure resources, and explore ways to make computing more equitably accessible to researchers and students at smaller institutions.
Samuel will be co-hosting the next BRICCs workshop in the UT Student Union December 8-10.
“When I first started going to the BRICCs workshops, what I thought were paramount cyberinfrastructure needs for smaller schools were all wrong. I wanted to share with them all the opportunities to access computational resources, but instead, what I learned was an overwhelming need for training and workforce development,” Samuel said. “It really helped solidify in my head the need to first develop a shared understanding of needs and challenges at under-resourced institutions and then collaboratively devise plans to solve them.”
Contact
Rhiannon Potkey (865-974-0683, rpotkey@utk.edu)