Three Oregon State University students working with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory received the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) Startup Allocation based on their senior design capstone project.

Taylor Alexander Brown (computer science), Heidi Ann Clayton (computer science),  and Xiaomei Wang (finance), also won the CH2M Multidisciplinary Collaboration Award at the 2017 Undergraduate Engineering Expo at Oregon State for their project called Coal and Open-pit surface mining impacts on American Lands (COAL).

The team created a system to process remote-sensing data to identify land surface types, coal mining operations, and the environmental impacts on water resources to help NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory study the effects of coal mining on the environment.

The XSEDE award will allow the team to continue development on the project including the use of XSEDE resources for benchmarking, evaluation and experimentation. Funded by the National Science Foundation, XSEDE is a collection of integrated advanced digital resources and services.

“The availability and opportunity to use computational infrastructure of this caliber will further enable the development of a science gateway to continue foundational COAL research,” said Lewis John McGibbney, data scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the client for the project.

“I am extremely proud of the team’s achievements and know that such endeavors set a high standard for each and every one of them as they progress further through their journey in higher education and beyond.”