BIG DATA

Michael Veilleux, a Cornell University graduate student, was recently awarded the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (CSGF). The CSGF is a program funded by the Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Defense Programs, and Office of Science. This program works to identify and provide support for some of the very best computational science graduate students in the nation. This fellowship has supported over 120 students at approximately 50 universities. For over 10 years, the CSGF has trained scientists to meet the nation’s workforce needs. Graduates of the program now work in DOE laboratories, private industry, and educational institutions. "Mike has earned the most prestigious national fellowship in computational mechanics,” said Cornell University’s Dwight C. Baum Professor of Engineering in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering Tony Ingraffea. “Only about 15 are awarded each year. He is also entering a fellowship of other awardees and soon-to-be colleagues at the DoE national labs who are expecting great accomplishments from him." Veilleux was selected for the fellowship based on his academic standing, the quality of his research project, and the available computational resources. He will be working with Professor Ingraffea on the Structural Integrity Prognosis System (SIPS) and will make use of the Cornell Theory Center’s (CTC) high-performance computing clusters. CTC’s Computational Materials Institute is a lead academic institution in a project that has been awarded $14.1 million of a potential $32 million, if all the options are exercised, from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The contract will be used to develop and demonstrate a physics-based approach to predict the state of structural health of individual Department of Defense vehicles. SIPS will discover and track the precursors of structural failure and provide predictions of vehicle structural health under a variety of future usage options. The multi-year project will use state-of the-art computational, laboratory, and manufacturing facilities for research, development, fabrication, and testing, including one of the high-performance computing clusters of CTC: a Windows-based 128-dual processor machine ranked as one of the 100 fastest supercomputers in the world. “I will be working with the team to advance the capabilities of computational fracture analysis programs for the purposes of developing more accurate structural damage state models of air vehicles,” said Veilleux. “The research promises to create safer structures and further develop my knowledge within my newfound interests of computational fracture mechanics.” Veilleux is the son of Vickie and the late Gilbert Veilleux, of Oakland, Maine. He is a graduate of Messalonskee High School and earned his undergraduate degree at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Civil and Environmental Engineering. After the fellowship, Veilleux hopes to continue researching for a private firm, an educational institution, or a national laboratory. CTC is a high-performance computing and interdisciplinary research center located on the Ithaca campus of Cornell University with additional offices in Manhattan. CTC currently operates an Intel/Windows cluster complex consisting of more than 1500 processors, in addition to Unisys ES7000 Servers. Scientific and engineering projects supported by CTC represent a vast variety of disciplines, including bioinformatics, behavioral and social sciences, business, computer science, engineering, finance, geosciences, mathematics, physical sciences. For more information, visit http://www.tc.cornell.edu or http://www.ctc-hpc.com.