Ronak Monga continues to make a difference at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering.
The data science major took first place in the ACM Association for Computing Machinery’s student research competition for undergraduates for his “Comparative Study of the Cache Utilization Trends for Regional Scientific Data Caches” poster.
The award was part of the SC Conference Series for the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis. It was held in Denver.
The conference brings together thousands of scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, programmers and developers to highlight high-performance computing research.
Monga’s research centered on determining whether and how in-network regional data caching systems that store scientific data can reduce network traffic and access latency.
The goal was to find ways to make it faster and easier to get scientific data from the Internet by storing it closer to where people need it.
Monga was previously a research intern at Berkeley Lab. He was mentored by Berkeley Lab Computing Science’s Alex Sim and John Wu.
“The experience overall was amazing,” Monga said. “The conference was much larger than I was expecting, something like 10,000 to 15,000 attendees who were all doing amazing things in the world of supercomputing.
“I felt lucky to have the opportunity to simply be involved in such an event. Winning best undergraduate poster was just a cherry on top. I went in with no expectations, and it was a lot more fun and rewarding than I could've imagined.
“The work itself was also really fun -- I did my research over the summer at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and I got lucky to be paired with two amazing advisors who helped me every step of the way. They gave me room to explore and play with the data we had. It led into something real, as research often doesn’t.”
Beyond research, Monga is very active in the Luddy community. He is a Luddy Living and Learning Center Peer Mentor as well as a Luddy Tutor. Last year, he was a member of the Luddy LLC.