More than 175 high school, undergraduate, and graduate students have applied to participate in this year’s annual TeraGrid conference (TG’10) to be held August 2-5 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, indicating strong interest among younger men and women in pursuing careers throughout the computer sciences and research fields. In all, submissions from 114 students have been accepted for this year’s conference.

“We are delighted with the high level of interest among students in joining this year’s TeraGrid conference,” said Laura McGinnis, TeraGrid’10 Student Program Coordinator. “We received about three times the number of applicants needed to fill our student volunteer spots for this year’s event alone, and the quality of submissions for our Student Poster Contest and Student Programming Contest was outstanding.”

McGinnis, manager of education and training with the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center (PSC), a TeraGrid partner, also reports that the response to TeraGrid’s call for student research papers was strong, and that three undergraduate or graduate students will be recognized by TeraGrid as “Emerging Scientists” at this summer’s conference for conducting research using TeraGrid or Open Science Grid (OSG) resources.

In addition, the 114 students whose applications were accepted will receive funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help defray the costs of attending TG’10, including complimentary registration to the annual event. Sixteen of the accepted students will also be attending the Open Science Grid Summer School, July 19-22, in Madison, Wisconsin.

In addition to students, TG’10 will be widely attended by scientists, engineers, and others throughout academia, who will participate in a full range of research and technical presentations and workshops offered during the course of the conference.

Funded by the NSF, TeraGrid is the world's largest, most comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research, with resources at 11partner sites around the U.S. to create an integrated, persistent computational resource. TeraGrid resources currently include more than a petaflop/s (a thousand trillion calculations per second) of computing capability, and more than 30 petabytes of online and archival data storage, with rapid access and retrieval over high-performance networks.