First week at TACC
From left to right, Fatima Al-Quaiti (St. Mary's University), Grace M. Rodríguez (University of Puerto Rico - Río Piedras Campus), Marvis Cruz (University of Florida), James Pippin (Fort Valley State University), Joseph Molina (, Linda Moise (Virginia Union University), Tiffany Connors (Texas State University), Joshua Matos (University of Puerto Rico - Mayagüez Campus), Alan Garcia, Zeerak Abbas (University of Texas at Austin) and Keith Waggoner (University of Alabama).
This is the first week that we started working at TACC and I feel like we have been working for almost 2 weeks. Monday was orientation day where they welcome us and we met with the manager of the program, Rosalia Gómez. We were also given an activity so we could get to know each other better and explore the building for ourselves. I was very overwhelmed by everything and all the awesome people that are in the group but I was also very excited. Rosalia Gómez said how we were chosen from approximately 205 applicants and I feel so blessed to be here.
After that, we had more introductory workshops, including a little bit of history about TACC, the ICERT program and how to make an awesome website. They later gave us a tour in all of the building. Once we were finished, we want back to the main campus to get our ID's and our first check. Ohhh yeah! $$$
I'm faculty and staff! Double win!
On both Tuesday and Wednesday we had more technical workshops. On Tuesday, they gave us an introduction to the user environment of TACC's Supercomputer Stampede and TACC's systems overall. Afterwards, they gave us an introduction to Linux/Unix. Since I have a lot of experience using Linux and entering servers through the command line, I mostly helped my peers. I did a learned a couple of new techniques, like how to use MPI and idev to submit jobs to the queue in order to compile your programs.
Later in the day, they gave us a tour in the machine room were we got to see the monster that is Stampede, who is the 10th fastest supercomputer in the world. We also got to see other systems that are in TACC, like Hikari, that is mostly used to test solar power, Mavericks, Lone Star and many more.
As mentioned earlier, we had more technical workshops on Wednesday as well. They gave us an introduction to Python, which was pretty easy to understand, so I mostly help my peers follow the instructor. The other workshop was an introduction to R, which proved to be more challenging since I had never worked with R before, and I felt the instructor was going through the powerpoint pretty fast. Nevertheless, I learned a couple of new concepts, and I learn the basics of using the interface of R Studio.
I finally got to meet my mentor, Andrew Solis, on Thursday. I also found out that me and Marvis Cruz are going to be working on the same project. Andrew show us around the vislab of TACC that's on campus and give us an overview of the computers and monitors.
He showed us some of the different projects they're working on in Stallion, which is a huge wall of monitors put together as one screen. There is also a clusters of touch screen monitors called Lasso with a couple of cool games and demo which we got to try out. I was so excited to finally see a legit laboratory on visualisation, and all the testing they do with Oculus Rift and HTC. We even got to try some demos that were developed there.
We also got to meet Marvis' mentor, Dr. Brian McCann, who is neural computation scientist but he specializes in computer science. As Andrew said, he is indeed a fountain of knowledge. He showed us and the other research students in the vislab around the new Vislab that is at TACC. It was so high tech and pretty, with $4,000 monitors each and $6000 sensors. We later meet with him to talk about our project.
Our project: We decided to choose a project that hasn't been started yet. It's a post seizure empathy tool. The idea is to have a virtual reality section that simulates some of the effects that some people have after they went through a seizure or/and epilepsy. Some of these symptoms include blurry vision, disorientation, objects disappearing and reappearing, heavy breathing, among others. The project's story needs to be further developed, but so far we have been given the task to practice using Unity and C#, research about controlling sound in Unity and how to blurry objects. We will probably use HTC as the VR tool in this project.
Challenge of the week: My biggest concern was the fact that I still didn't know what project I was going to be assigned and what exact technologies I needed to prepare for. I didn't knew much about my mentor either until Thursday, so I was a little worried that I was going to get behind in building the abstract for the project. I had put myself as goal to work everything with time and not leave for last minute.
How I overcame that challenge: I'm pretty excited about my project because I'm actually going to build a project around VR technology and I have experts in the field I can ask questions to. I decided to work on this project because it helps me better my game developing, coding and artistic skills and because I always wanted to work in something related to medicine, but I had always been cautious on what because I don't like anything that has to do with biology or chemistry. Also, two heads are better than one, and we're actually getting two mentors that we can ask if we get stuck somewhere.
