GOVERNMENT
NCSA selects research fellows for collaborative projects
Four researchers from institutions across the country, nine from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and one from abroad have been awarded fellowships enabling them to pursue diverse collaborative projects with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). 
For the first time, NCSA has selected a scholar from one of its international partners for a fellowship. Loukas Kalisperis holds appointments at both Penn State University and The Cyprus Institute and is a member of the Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center (CSTRC) and the Science and Technology in Archaeology Research Center. His research includes high-performance visualization and immersive environments. The four fellows who will receive support to collaborate with NCSA this summer are:
For the first time, NCSA has selected a scholar from one of its international partners for a fellowship. Loukas Kalisperis holds appointments at both Penn State University and The Cyprus Institute and is a member of the Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center (CSTRC) and the Science and Technology in Archaeology Research Center. His research includes high-performance visualization and immersive environments. The four fellows who will receive support to collaborate with NCSA this summer are:
- Walter C. Ermler, University of Texas at San Antonio. Project: COLUMBUS Parallel Spin-Orbit Configuration Interaction—Education and Research. The COLUMBUS suite of molecular electronic structure codes will be enhanced with new modules, massively parallel capabilities, and visualizations and will be made available on systems at NCSA. The project will result in a capability that can be readily used by the computational science research community and in postsecondary educational environments.
- Farzad Mashayek, University of Illinois at Chicago. Project: Simulations of Liquid-fuel Combustors. The goal of this project is to investigate novel ideas for increasing heat release per unit volume while maintaining a stable flame in liquid-fuel dump combustors, with particular attention to liquid fuels driven from biological sources. Mashayek also plans to work with NCSA on a proposal for a graduate education grant.
- Jun Ni, University of Iowa. Project: Scalability analysis and experiments of cyberinfrastructure-enabled petascale computing for 3D CT medical imaging reconstructions. Better medical imaging can provide earlier diagnosis for cancer. Ni will work with NCSA to investigate the potential for algorithms for 3D reconstruction of microscopic and high-resolution CT image data to scale up to take advantage of extremely powerful computing systems, such as the Blue Waters systems NCSA will deploy in 2011. Blue Waters will provide sustained performance of at least one quadrillion calculations each second.
- Kyungwha Park, Virginia Tech. Project: Simulations of Quantum Electronic Spin Transport through Large Magnetic Molecules. Park will port the recently developed SMEAGOL code for calculating quantum transport to NCSA's powerful Abe cluster with the goal of improving the code's scaling and performance.
The nine University of Illinois fellows who will work with NCSA over the 2008-2009 academic year are:
- Anne D. Hedeman, Art & Design. Project: Cyber Connoisseurship: Tools to Aid Understanding of the Medieval French Book Trade.
- Atul Jain, Atmospheric Sciences. Project: Enhanced Climate Simulations and Earth System Modeling using High-End Computing Systems.
- Duane Johnson, Materials Science and Engineering. Project: GridChem Electronic-Structure Information Workflow and Database.
- Mark Neubauer, Physics. Project: Petascale Distributed Computing for Terascale Physics.
- Sever Tipei, Music. Project: Balancing Competing Requirements in a Large-scale Network as a Paradigm for Music Composition.
- Rizwan Uddin, Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering. Project: Parallel, Modified Nodal Integral Method and Innovative Application Accelerators (such as FPGAs, GPUs) for Turbulence Modeling using LES and DNS.
- Petros Voulgaris, Aerospace Engineering. Project: Simulation-Based Performance and Robustness Analysis of Large Distributed Control Applications.
- Sheng Zhong, Bioengineering. Project: Computational Identification of Transcription Networks in Embryonic Stem Cells. This is a continuation of Zhong's 07-08 fellowship.
- Xinguang Zhu, Plant Biology. Project: Toward an "in silico plant" research platform.
Since 1999, 90 University of Illinois faculty members from 12 colleges and 47 departments have participated in the campus fellowship program, and many have continued their collaborations with NCSA beyond their fellowship year. For more information on NCSA fellowships, see fellowships.ncsa.uiuc.edu.