CHEMISTRY

The Cornell Theory Center (CTC), an interdisciplinary research center at Cornell University focused on providing cyberinfrastructure resources for research and education, will have six participants at the Opportunities for High Performance Computing in Agriculture and Life Sciences ACRES symposium—Linda Callahan, Executive Director of CTC and Harold van Es, Cornell University Professor of Soil and Water Management, as well as four graduate students. The symposium will be held at The Center for High Performance Computing at Utah State University March 26 and 27, 2007. The meeting is supported by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service (USDA CSREES). Van Es will present in the HPC in Agriculture and Life Sciences session. His presentation will describe the Cornell Computational Agriculture Initiative (CCAI). This project is a collaborative effort between CTC and Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) to link CALS faculty with CTC personnel in developing applications for high-performance computing in agriculture. Van Es is also the lead principal investigator for the initiative. Van Es explains, “Specifically the CCAI in conjunction with CTC is advancing research on data-intensive agricultural problems, developing high-performance computing management tools and databases for the agricultural community, and training a cadre of young scientists on the applications of HPC to agricultural problems.” Both Callahan and van Es will serve as part of panel discussions at the symposium. Van Es will function as part of the panel on Opportunities for HPC in Agricultural Research on March 26. Callahan will chair the Bringing HPC to New Research Communities session on March 27. She will speak about how CTC got involved in agricultural research through the Cornell Computational Agriculture Initiative. Brian Belcher, Ivy Tan, Judith ball, and Andres Berger will present posters on work related to high-resolution climate data, nitrogen modeling, near-infrared spectroscopy, and weed modeling, which are all projects that rely on CTC computational resources. The symposium will also offer hands-on teaching workshops to demonstrate HPC tools, including visualization, data mining, and scientific computing for agriculture applications. Other presentations will be given by University of Nevada Las Vegas, Utah State University, Brigham Young University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of Alaska Fairbanks and CSREES.