Student Research Proposal Guidelines

In the scientific community, individuals who need to use high-performance computers (supercomputers) for their research must receive approval on research proposals that they submit to a university or company that owns a supercomputer. The university or company then allocates the researcher a certain amount of time to run his or her calculations on the supercomputer. In order to have students practice writing such proposals, any student or team of students who are planning to do an individual or group research project are required to submit a proposal to Mr. Gotwals ( gotwals@ncssm.edu ). The proposal must be sent as an email attachment, and the attachment should be a Word document or a PDF file. The proposal will be reviewed by a committee of scientists. If it is approved, the student will receive information about setting up an account and proceeding with his/her research. Students are also strongly encouraged to find a university research mentor to advise them on their project. If finding a mentor proves to be difficult, students can email Mr. Gotwals ( gotwals@ncssm.edu ) and he will connect them with a suitable mentor.

A student research proposal should include the following elements:

The title of planned research project
A 250-word abstract that includes the following:
- Question and/or purpose of the research project
- Method of calculations
- Amount of server time needed, which consists of job time and server time:
  
  Job Time
  
  The maximum time required to run an individual job, should be under 60 minutes, unless permission has been granted for a longer time
  
  Server Time
  
  Total time required for server use
Name of sponsoring teacher and/or mentor

Notes about student research projects:

Students are strongly encouraged to submit their research to The Journal of Student Computational Chemistry (view the Spring 2007 volume of this journal at http://chemistry.ncssm.edu/JCompChem.pdf ).
This computational chemistry server is unsuitable for running jobs that inlcude large proteins, DNA, or large biomolecules. If a project requires computer calculations involving any of these types of molecules, the student should contact Mr. Gotwals (gotwals@ncssm.edu). Mr. Gotwals will help the student find an alternate computing resource for the research project.
For additional information about designing and completing a research project, click on the following link to Chapter 24 of Computational Chemistry for Chemistry Educators, by Mr. Gotwals and Dr. Sendlinger: http://chemistry.ncssm.edu/book/chap24/Chap24Research.pdf .