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Interns Making an Impact: Tim Blakely
September 13, 2012
Introduction: Our interns explore new ideas, accelerate the launch of new product features, and are big contributors to Google. Technical interns are embedded in every major engineering team where their impact is unconstrained by titles. They truly “do cool things that matter” and we’re sharing their stories with you now. Today we're featuring Tim Blakely, a PhD student at the University of Washington and a current Software Engineering Intern in our Seattle office. Interested in a technical internship at Google? Apply online at
google.com/students/intern
What are you working on? What is your internship project?
I am the lead developer on BigBrain, a large-scale computational neuroscience tool built on the cloud. The project began as an exploratory venture between Google and the
Allen Institute for Brain Science
(AIBS) to investigate whether the cloud could provide a platform for doing massively parallel, large-scale neural simulations.
Over the first four months of my internship, the project progressed to the point where a collaborative design document is being drafted in anticipation of a long term, collaborative relationship between Google and Allen.
The project is now going to be open-sourced—as per the request of the AIBS—which poses an interesting design problem: The program was originally started as an internal project that leveraged many internal Google technologies that are not currently public. Moving to full-open-source required that many of these technologies be changed or re-implemented. I worked on that transition, which we completed in July.
How would you explain your job to your best friend who is not a computer science major?
To say Google has tons and tons of computing power is the understatement of the century. Google recently launched an initiative to expose a lot of this computing power to the public in the form of the
Google Compute Engine
, which allows anyone to run programs in the Google cloud. It’s this available computing power that caught the attention of the AIBS. Because their next phase deals heavily with computational neuroscience, they have to decide what to do with their technology budget: do they buy a special-purpose supercomputer to fit their computing requirements, or can they instead leverage Google’s huge computing resources to meet their goals? And this is where I fit in. The goal of my internship is to answer the question, if the AIBS were to design a neural simulator that runs in the Google cloud, how would this be accomplished and what interesting and unique scientific questions could this answer?
Instead of taking the conventional (and lengthy) approach to biology research, which involves engineering proteins, cells and animal models directly in a lab, we looked at how we might implement the model in a computer simulation and simulate how the protein would affect a virtual brain. In this case, “changing the amount of protein expressed in the system” is simply a matter of changing a single parameter in a file and running the simulation again—a significantly cheaper and more efficient way of running experiments. And because the cloud is a big place, we’re designing our simulator so that the scientists at the AIBS can run tens, hundreds, or even thousands of these virtual brains at the same time. Doing the same thing in a physical biological model would be impractical, if not impossible!
In what ways have you been able to innovate at Google? What makes working at Google unique for you?
The project is interesting in that it’s a “vertical” project. That simply means taking many of the available Google technologies and applying them to a specific problem area. It’s a very unique position to be in; the scientific community at large has huge problems that require massive computational power, but very few have made the transition from private small-scale clusters to the cloud. By working closely with the AIBS, we are demonstrating how the cloud is a viable and valuable platform for scientific computing and hopefully beginning to shed some light on how valuable Google’s computational power is to the scientific and engineering community. On the flip side, it also is an important project from inside Google’s as well; with all the products and platforms available to the public, how can Google make its tools work together more fluidly and be more accessible to the huge market of scientific and engineering research and development?
What do you like most about your job? Are there personal rewards from the work you do?
My team (Big Science) has a really great dynamic and has the important role of building engineering and business relationships with the scientific community. I love science and the process of discovery, but at heart I’m an engineer and really love solving the practical problems that scientists run into. This job allows me to do both! And the fact that the project is open source is hugely important to me, in that I both get to give back to the scientific community and hopefully contribute something to the field of computational neuroscience community as well. It also doesn’t hurt to be able to tell friends and family of the awesome work I’m doing :)
Overall, how do you feel about your time here at Google, and what do you see yourself doing next?
To be honest? Working at Google full-time! Google’s tackling the cloud in a huge way, and going forward it’s important to build the relationship between Google and the engineering and scientific communities at large. I would love to be a part of that effort!
What advice do you have for students who are interested in an internship at Google?
Do it! Don’t be afraid of stepping out of your comfort zone. If you’re a C coder and get on a project that mainly uses python or Java, don’t get discouraged. Think of it as an opportunity to learn some new skills that will make you a better software engineer. Also, keep in mind that there’s more to being an engineer at Google than just hacking code. The opportunity to discuss, influence and change the direction of a product and contribute to its success can’t be emphasized enough. There’s really a unique and fun culture here, which is definitely something to embrace.
Posted by Jacqueline Pan, University and Intern Programs Specialist
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