GOVERNMENT
USC receives $20M federal research grant
USC's Viterbi School of Engineering will take the lead on more than $20 million in new research programs, the US Department of Energy announced last week. The Department of Energy annually grants more than $60 million to 20 programs at universities and government research labs around the nation, making comprehensive research possible. USC applied for this grant through a series of competitive proposal reviews, Viterbi Dean Yannis Yortsos said. The DOE has awarded many grants to Viterbi in the past several years, but this particular grant is part of its new program, Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing.
The process required to receive funding is a very competitive and grueling task. Peer review determines each project's budget, depending on the strength of the proposals, Yortsos said. This grant will support the research of the principal investigators in the relevant departments at USC: the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, the Computer Science Department, the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Information Sciences Institute. "The two main research areas pertain to the computer simulation of the corrosion process and to enhancing the performance of computer simulation of petascale systems," Yortsos said. "Any new resources add to our (wide range) of tools, human capital and energy for new discoveries and new applications that benefit the society," Yortsos said. Yortsos said the DOE is hoping to boost the national competitiveness in science and engineering and is, therefore, funding universities to accomplish functional research. "Performing computations at the petascale level gives us an edge in science and engineering, which through a myriad of applications will benefit society in a number of ways, from better climate forecasting, to new energy sources, to better environmental cleanup methods," he said. A vital part of this funding will go to ISI, one of the first information technology research institutes in the nation. ISI will be involved with three of the four studies funded by this grant. "The mission of ISI is to bridge between pure academic research and the marketplace by doing highly multidisciplinary research aimed at producing working prototypes of new technology," said Eric Mankin, ISI director of public information. About $70 million per year funds various subjects within ISI. For this study, ISI will receive about $4.125 million, just a little less than one-third of the entire project. The rest will go to nine other institutions. Robert Lucas, director of the division of computational sciences at ISI, will be leading and molding the project and coordinating the work of various teams. Priya Vashishta - who has joint appointment in Viterbi's departments of computer science and the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science - and the USC College Department of Physics and Astronomy will lead a $5.5 million study. The goal of this project will be to create more accurate and useful models, at the atomic level, for understanding corrosion effects. Vashishta will work with colleagues Rajiv K. Kalia and Aiichiro Nakano at USC, as well as investigators from five other institutions. "We are working on programming technology that automatically 'tunes up' ultra-performance petascale computers so that the software can make the most effective use of the hardware capabilities," said Mary Hall, associate research professor in the Computer Science Department. The goal is to get tools from this effort to the DOE labs quickly, Hall said. A great strength of Viterbi lies with graduate research, Yortsos said. "Pushing the frontiers of science and engineering through high-performance computing and simulations makes Viterbi and USC a research powerhouse."
The process required to receive funding is a very competitive and grueling task. Peer review determines each project's budget, depending on the strength of the proposals, Yortsos said. This grant will support the research of the principal investigators in the relevant departments at USC: the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, the Computer Science Department, the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Information Sciences Institute. "The two main research areas pertain to the computer simulation of the corrosion process and to enhancing the performance of computer simulation of petascale systems," Yortsos said. "Any new resources add to our (wide range) of tools, human capital and energy for new discoveries and new applications that benefit the society," Yortsos said. Yortsos said the DOE is hoping to boost the national competitiveness in science and engineering and is, therefore, funding universities to accomplish functional research. "Performing computations at the petascale level gives us an edge in science and engineering, which through a myriad of applications will benefit society in a number of ways, from better climate forecasting, to new energy sources, to better environmental cleanup methods," he said. A vital part of this funding will go to ISI, one of the first information technology research institutes in the nation. ISI will be involved with three of the four studies funded by this grant. "The mission of ISI is to bridge between pure academic research and the marketplace by doing highly multidisciplinary research aimed at producing working prototypes of new technology," said Eric Mankin, ISI director of public information. About $70 million per year funds various subjects within ISI. For this study, ISI will receive about $4.125 million, just a little less than one-third of the entire project. The rest will go to nine other institutions. Robert Lucas, director of the division of computational sciences at ISI, will be leading and molding the project and coordinating the work of various teams. Priya Vashishta - who has joint appointment in Viterbi's departments of computer science and the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science - and the USC College Department of Physics and Astronomy will lead a $5.5 million study. The goal of this project will be to create more accurate and useful models, at the atomic level, for understanding corrosion effects. Vashishta will work with colleagues Rajiv K. Kalia and Aiichiro Nakano at USC, as well as investigators from five other institutions. "We are working on programming technology that automatically 'tunes up' ultra-performance petascale computers so that the software can make the most effective use of the hardware capabilities," said Mary Hall, associate research professor in the Computer Science Department. The goal is to get tools from this effort to the DOE labs quickly, Hall said. A great strength of Viterbi lies with graduate research, Yortsos said. "Pushing the frontiers of science and engineering through high-performance computing and simulations makes Viterbi and USC a research powerhouse." 
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