My background: I am a HPC sysadmin, and I administer a cluster of about 240 nodes. I have a PhD in astrophysics, and have done research in computational medical

My background: I am a HPC sysadmin, and I administer a cluster of about 240 nodes. I have a PhD in astrophysics, and have done research in computational medical physics. The users I currently support are mostly people who molecular dynamics codes. Molecular dynamics could an ideal match for the hardware and your own knowledge: the standard MD codes (NAMD, VASP, Wien2k, Quantum Espresso) in the field are all well-tested and debugged. Some of them (NAMD at least) can also take advantage of GPUs. These codes represent hundreds of person-hours of R&D. I advise against reinventing the wheel. In fact, in almost all established computational science endeavours, it is safe to say that you should not start from scratch. And definitely not if you have just a single semester. I don't know much about existing quantum monte carlo codes, nor how mature the application of GPUs is to QMC. I assume you will do a brief literature review. (Brief because one semester means that the scope of your project has to be fairly well-limited.) Communicate with QMC practitioners via mailing lists etc, too. There are bound to be some problems people have that they just never got round to figuring out due to other priorities. Parallel programming is hard, GPU programming is hard, and transforming serial algorithms into GPU-efficient algorithms is hard. But that's half the fun. :)