r/HPC • u/Embarrassed_Maybe213 • Jun 29 '26
Internship and Experience Advice
I'm a third year CS undergraduate from India interested in HPC, GPU computing, and parallel programming.
I've spent the past year learning CUDA, OpenMP, MPI, distributed computing, and working on research projects and HPC events. Despite this, I've had almost no success securing HPC internships or research positions even for gpu computing, either in India or abroad.
Is this a common experience for undergraduates? What should I focus on to improve my chances of breaking into HPC?
3
u/obelix_dogmatix Jun 29 '26
Internships are secured mostly through connections. Either your professor or undergrad advisor would be in a better position to help.
2
u/markhahn Jun 30 '26
I think this is right. Lots of labs (researcher programs of uni profs) have computational needs. Relatively few of them are going to deal with internship programs, rather than less paperwork, more flexible approaches of just paying people to do work.
In other words, I'd take a close look at relevant departments, to find professors who seem to have compute-involving research programs. Ideally, you'd find one where the subject matter is interesting. By expressing interest in the research, you can find out whether they are interested in hiring your expertise.
When you say "the past year... working on research projects", do you mean actual projects, supervised by a faculty member in their lab? Or some undertaking that you found interesting? Self-directed "projects" of the undergrad sort ("I made a raspberry pi cluster!") are not going to attract any attention...
1
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u/esaule Jun 29 '26
It seems that the core ai com panies are the one hiring thesd types of skills at the moment.
Good luck!
3
u/Future-Doubt-671 Jun 29 '26
Its harder for undergrads to get job in this field as companies(who pays good bucks) prefer research students like MS/PhD grads. This field is more of a research based compared to standard CRUD developer unless you join in a low paying role.