ACADEMIA

The High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory (HPCVL) is pleased to announce the appointment of three HPCVL-Sun Microsystems of Canada Chairs in Computational Science and Engineering. Funding for these chairs has been made possible through strong support by Sun Microsystems of Canada.

"As a Sun Centre of Excellence that uses Sun technologies to further research, we are proud to partner with HPCVL to provide researchers with a choice of high-performance computing server architectures to better support their varied application requirements," said Andy Bechtolsheim, Product Architect, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems Inc. "We congratulate the HPCVL-Sun Chairs on their new positions and are confident that their innovative research will open the doors to important scientific knowledge and technological development."

The three scientists -Dr. Jorg-Rudiger Sack of Carleton University, Dr. Stavros Tavoularis from the University of Ottawa, and Dr. Ugo Piomelli from Queen's University - are all major contributors to important research in Canada. Drs. Sack and Tavoularis were amongst the original investigators who established HPCVL. "We're proud to support the work of these researchers in their quest to advance discovery," says Dr. Ken Edgecombe, Executive Director of HPCVL.

Dr. Sack is currently researching intelligent systems for Geographic Information Services (GIS), working to develop intelligent maps that can be customized and sent to devices such as cell phones or PDAs. Using the lab's parallel computing resources, he is developing applications to enhance mapping features based on individual needs and context, such as maps that rotate to match the user's location.

Dr. Tavoularis is a fluid dynamicist with an international reputation in research ranging from the fundamentals of turbulence to flows in nuclear reactor cores, in jet engines, and in natural and artificial hearts. The support from Sun will allow him to expand a groundbreaking research program on nuclear reactor thermalhydraulics, whose objective is to assist the Canadian nuclear industry in developing improved tools for the safety analysis of current and future reactors.

Dr. Piomelli is using the funding to support students working in the area of environmental flows in lakes and rivers and in haemodynamics, the study of blood flow. Dr. Piomelli, who is also the Canada Research Chair in Computational Turbulence at Queen's University, says that HPCVL's resources were a vital element in his decision to move to Canada and Queen's in 2008. "The Lab's significant technological resources, along with funding through the HPCVL/Sun and Canada Research Chairs, allow me the freedom to explore new ideas and partnerships rather than focusing strictly on project-based work" he says. "This type of research truly leads to innovative ideas and solutions for our future."