Pratyush Muthukumar is a student intern with our Prototypes & Testbed Team. He is a 2021 Goldwater Scholar at UC Irvine, working toward a BS in Computer Science. 

My time as an intern at ESnet has been thrilling and rewarding. Over the last seven months as an intern here, I have learned many valuable research, scholarly, and professional skills that I will undoubtedly use in the future. 

I have primarily been working on the SENSE (Software Defined Networking [SDN] for End-to-End Networked Science at the Exascale) project with my amazing mentors, Xi Yang and Tom Lehman, and this has been exciting and fascinating. I’ve learned a plethora of new research skills and frameworks, including multi-domain monitoring, software-defined networking, network polling, scripting, and virtualization. My project mentors have provided great guidance and supported me throughout every stage of the project. What I enjoy best about being an intern at ESnet is the resources, guidance, and tools available to support my research. I’m excited to work on such a challenging yet rewarding tool that will soon have real-world impact when deployed on ESnet.

The environment as an ESnet intern has been extremely friendly and inviting. I feel a part of the community within ESnet and I really enjoy attending the frequent seminars and brown bag lunches held multiple times weekly. Learning about new research developments from other teams at ESnet and guest lecturers from the Computer Science and Mathematics department at UC Berkeley has broadened my knowledge and interests greatly.

While my experiences may have been different during an in-person internship at ESnet, I appreciate the numerous networking and social activities that ESnet has facilitated to make remote interns feel connected. I have really enjoyed my time as an ESnet intern thus far, and I’m looking forward to the rest of my time at ESnet!

If you are interested in learning more about future summer opportunities with ESnet, please see this link (https://cs.lbl.gov/careers/summer-student-and-faculty-program/). We typically post notices and accept applications for the next summer starting in January or February.