Two Argonne graduate students – Sihuan Li and Xin Liang – are among the thirty winners of IEEE BigData 2018 student travel awards. Both Li and Liang are Ph.D. students at the University of California, Riverside, and both currently have long-term research internships in the Mathematics and Computer Science (MCS) division at Argonne.

Li received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2015. His research focuses on high-performance computing, parallel computing technologies for big data analytics, numerical algorithms and software, and large-scale computer simulations. In 2018 Li held a summer internship at Argonne National Laboratory.

Liang received his bachelor’s degree in computer science with a minor in mathematics from Peking University in 2014. He is interested in high-performance computing, numerical linear algebra algorithms and software, and algorithm-based fault tolerance. Liang has collaborated with Argonne researchers on several papers on large-scale data analysis and reduction.

Each award winner will receive a check of $800 to cover partial travel expenses to present papers at the BigData conference in Seattle, Washington, December 10-13, 2018.

“I am delighted that both these young researchers have won these awards,” said Franck Cappello, a senior computer scientist who is co-supervising their work with Sheng Di in the MCS division on compression techniques for large-scale simulations.

“This research addresses a critical issue, namely, how to store extremely large volumes of scientific data efficiently, and presenting their work at major conferences such as BigData is a superb opportunity to interact with experts in the field,” Di said.