PROCESSORS

Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared: Nearly everyone has heard of Einstein’s famous formula, but who knows what E=mc2 actually means? Don’t expect to be enlightened here. If you really want to know, ask astrophysicist Ed Seidel, the new director of LSU’s Center for Applied Information Technology and Learning. He eats this stuff for breakfast. While most folks are preoccupied with the mundane, Seidel’s mind is in outer space, puzzling over how to detect gravitational waves emanating from black holes colliding in space. That alone can take up all of a person’s time, though Seidel—world-renowned for his research on black holes and high-speed computing—has a lot more on his plate these days as LSU CAPITAL’s chief. LSU CAPITAL aims to advance education and research across multiple academic disciplines—and boost economic development and entrepreneurship—by developing high-powered faculty and new technologies. Funding comes from Gov. Mike Foster’s information technology initiative, Vision 2020, which spreads an extra $25 million annually across a handful of Louisiana universities in a bid to create sustainable economic development for the state. LSU’s main campus gets the biggest piece, $9 million annually. Infinite potential LSU Chancellor Mark Emmert, clearly pleased to have lured Seidel away from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam, Germany, says he anticipates big things from the Maryland-born scientist. Emmert says Seidel is a heavyweight with enormous talents and international cachet, and that hiring him is further proof that LSU is serious about establishing itself as a world-class institution in applied information technology research. Emmert says he expects LSU CAPITAL to kick into overdrive with Seidel’s arrival. "We’ll see a huge surge in activity," he says. "We’ll see a dramatic increase in external funding in this whole area of applied information technology. We’ll see many more faculty and post-docs joining Ed from around the country." Seidel says he’s intrigued by the economic development aspect of LSU CAPITAL’s mission and calls the prospect of sparking new business ventures "fun." "I think there’s a lot you can do in Louisiana that hasn’t been done before," he says. "That’s part of the challenge and the attraction of it for me, being able to do things that haven’t been done before." Seidel, who talked a dozen members of his Potsdam research team into coming with him to Baton Rouge, admits he had a nice gig in Germany and loved living there but that the opportunity to put LSU on the information technology map was too strong to resist. "The thing that I saw here was a lot of potential that wasn’t really tapped yet, and also the willingness from the Legislature and the university and everyone I spoke to to really support it," Seidel says. "The idea of building something pretty extraordinary was a real attraction to me." It’s all relativity Potsdam was in the shadow of the Berlin Wall until 1989. The next big event for that city, with its historical connections to Einstein and gravitational physics, was the opening of the Planck Institute in 1995. Seidel’s association with the institute began in 1996 following a seven-year stint with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Within just a few years of his arrival at Potsdam as head of a team researching numerical relativity, the institute had achieved worldwide recognition. LSU CAPITAL has even more funding than the Planck Institute, Seidel says, and enjoys the backing of an entire university. Making LSU a serious player in information technology won’t necessarily be easy, but it’s "certainly doable," he says. He notes that LSU CAPITAL’s funding is roughly the same as that for the University of Illinois’ supercomputing center, which has parlayed its $10 million a year in state money into nearly $100 million annually in federal and corporate contracts. "There’s a lot of potential to leverage LSU’s money over a fairly short period of time of a few years to pull in some major grants, develop corporate partnerships and so on, and we’re going to really pursue those aggressively," Seidel says. LSU CAPITAL used $2.8 million of its Vision 2020 budget to purchase SuperMike, LSU’s world-class supercomputer and a huge jewel in LSU’s crown. Among other things, SuperMike’s blazingly fast calculating capacity, when linked with other supercomputers around the world, may allow Seidel and other scientists to better penetrate the mysteries of his beloved black holes. "The point is, that’s interesting research, but it draws a lot of attention to the state." Bleeding edge Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, is Seidel’s friend and close colleague. The two worked together at the University of Illinois, where Seidel was a post-doctoral fellow in the new field of numerical relativity, which Smarr helped pioneer. Smarr says LSU is very lucky to have convinced one of the world’s top researchers in computational physics to come to Baton Rouge. According to Smarr, Seidel is someone with endless energy—a "builder" who loves the chance to create something new. He points to the extraordinary success of the team Seidel assembled at the Potsdam institute and the international reputation it gained in just a few years. Smarr says Seidel is that rare scientist who also has the management skills necessary to get large, diverse teams of researchers working together. "I remember when Ed went to Germany and I said, ‘You’re doing just great here in the United States, why are you going?’ He says, ‘Well, it sounds like the opportunity to be a pioneer on the edge of the frontier,’ " Smarr says. He says Louisiana has a chance to emerge as a major player nationally with Seidel at the helm of LSU CAPITAL. Smarr says his former colleague has already contacted him about getting LSU involved in OptIPuter, Smarr’s bleeding edge, optical networking project—at the edge of what’s possible with the Internet. Smarr’s work over the last couple of decades has centered around building out the national information infrastructure and prototyping new capabilities such as the Web. "The question is will Louisiana realize the opportunity that it has here and make sure the support continues," he says. "At a moment like this when the economy is down, the states that make investments and place some bets on the future are the ones that lead us out of the recession." By Steve Clark, Business Report staff