NCSA Embarks On Diverse Projects with 17 Fellows

Eleven researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and six scholars for other institutions across the country will receive fellowships enabling them to work closely with the expert staff at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). These collaborative projects will tackle problems including improving understanding of dangerous blood clots, designing of virtual worlds, and developing the next-generation computers and applications that will operate at the petascale. "NCSA's fellowships enable researchers to address their most challenging research questions with the assistance of our expert staff and the benefit of our expertise in information technology, high-performance computing, data analysis, and other critical areas," said NCSA Director Thom Dunning. "Our mission is to advance discovery by empowering our collaborators." Summer fellowships provide financial support, including local housing and travel expenses, for researchers from other institutions, while University of Illinois faculty can receive up to $36,000 in support for collaborative projects. "The fellows programs offer opportunities to faculty to collaborate with NCSA staff and in turn extend opportunities for the NCSA staff to collaborate with faculty on projects of common interest and to be exposed to the breadth of research activities," said Radha Nandkumar, leader of the center's International and Campus Relations (ICARE) efforts. "This is a truly beneficial win-win activity." 2007-2008 University of Illinois faculty fellows:

• Michael Aref (Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering) seeks to improve diagnostic imaging of tumors and will work with Volodymyr Kindratenko, a researcher in NCSA's Innovative Systems Laboratory, to explore the hardware and software that will provide the rapid computation needed in a clinical setting.
• Roy Campbell (Computer Science) and Guy Garnett (School of Music) are interested in combining their efforts to develop tools to create virtual worlds with NCSA's expertise in collaborative computing and cyberenvironments. The goal is to develop a framework for building 3D virtual environments for the sciences, education, and the arts.
• Caroline A. Haythornthwaite (Library and Information Sciences) will work with NCSA's Michael Welge and Xavier Llora to develop techniques and tools to analyze the "communal conversation" created through email, bulletin boards, chat and blogs.
• Praveen Kumar (Civil and Environmental Engineering) will collaborate with NCSA's Peter Bajcsy to explore the requirements for and begin development of cyberinfrastructure for remote sensing informatics. The goal is to enable scientific investigations, modeling, prediction and decision support for a variety of earth system and environmental science disciplines, such as hydrology, climatology, and ecology.
• Todd Martinez (Chemistry), named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow in 2005, wants to create new tools for molecular dynamics simulations and analysis that can be shared, for free, with the research community. He and his team will work with NCSA's Sudhakar Pamidighantam, who is involved in the GridChem project, which helps chemistry researchers tap grid computing power.
• Arif Masud (Civil and Environmental Engineering) will tackle the life-threatening problem of how clots form in blood as it flows through the human body; blood clots and strokes cause hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United States each year. Working with Nahil Sobh, the leader of NCSA's Performance Engineering and Computational Methods group, Masud hopes to improve the code he has developed to computationally model clot formation.
• Wayne Pitard (Religious Studies) collaborates with the University of Southern California on InscriptiFact, an image database application that makes high-resolution images of ancient inscriptions from the Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds available via the Web. NCSA and the Illinois Center for Computing in Arts, Humanities, and Social Science (I-CHASS) will help the project expand to include 100,000 images and more sophisticated data analysis tools.
• Michael Shaw (Business Administration) plans to apply high-performance computing in the business realm, exploring business analytics, decision support, and risk analysis. He will work with NCSA's Bob Wilhelmson and Michael Welge.
• Saurabh Sinha (Computer Science) will analyze the recently sequenced honey bee genome in an effort to understand the molecular basis of the bee's social behavior. Comparing genomic information requires vast computing power, so NCSA will assist Sinha with adapting genomics tools to take advantage of cluster and grid computing systems and will provide expertise in data management and analysis.
• Sheng Zhong (Bioengineering) will collaborate with NCSA's Eric Jakobsson in an effort to better understand the mechanism that gives embryonic stem cells such potential for the treatment of diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. Zhong also plans to develop a package of tools for biophysical modeling that could be made available to other researchers.

2007 summer fellows:

• Yaohang Li (Computer Science, North Carolina A&T State University) plans to work with NCSA's Eric Jakobsson and Rick Kufrin in an effort to improve the resolution of computationally predicted protein structures.
• Farzad Mashayek (Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago) will work with NCSA's Nahil Sobh and David Bock on the simulation of novel biofuel liquid combustors.
• Vetle Torvik (Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago) will work with Noshir Contractor, leader of the Science of Networks in Communities research group at NCSA, to identify and quantify factors that influence the formation of scientific collaborations.
• Thanh Truong (Chemistry, University of Utah) will build on the work initiated during his 2006 summer fellowship. He will again work with NCSA's Tim Cockerill and Doru Marcusiu on the CSE-Online cyberenvironment, focusing on integrating a database of molecular properties derived from quantum chemistry calculations.
• Shaowen Wang (Geography, University of Iowa) will work with Luc Anselin, an NCSA senior researcher and professor in the Geography Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Wang and Anselin will develop new features for GISolve, a TeraGrid Science Gateway for geographic information science.
• Paul Woodward (Astronomy, University of Minnesota) has adapted his PPM gas dynamics applications to run on a novel computer architecture, the IBM Cell processor. During his fellowship he will work with NCSA's Innovative Systems Laboratory and with NCSA chief science officer Bob Wilhelmson, an atmospheric scientist, with the goal of better understanding how applications will need to be adapted for future petascale computing systems.

For more information, go to fellowships.ncsa.uiuc.edu or contact ICARE director Radha Nandkumar, 217-244-0650 or radha@ncsa.uiuc.edu.