Two IU projects receive awards from new federal research program

By George Vlahakis

Two projects funded through SciDAC will have a direct impact on research efforts at the new Pervasive Technology Labs, the IU School of Informatics and efforts to build E-Science Grids at IU.
Gannon

Two projects funded through SciDAC will have a direct impact on research efforts at the new Pervasive Technology Labs, the IU School of Informatics and efforts to build E-Science Grids at IU.

Among the 51 inaugural projects are projects involving IU Bloomington’s Department of Computer Science in high-performance computing and integrated software development. The IU projects are among 17 such efforts that will develop software infrastructure to support research collaboration, using distributed resources and scientific simulation on terascale computers—computers capable of doing trillions of calculations per second.

A total of $57 million is being awarded this fiscal year to advance fundamental research in several areas related to the department’s missions, which also include climate modeling, fusion energy sciences, chemical sciences, nuclear astrophysics and high energy physics.

“These two new projects will have a direct and positive impact on research efforts in IU’s new Pervasive Technology Labs, our new School of Informatics and our efforts to build E-Science Grids here at IU,” said Dennis Gannon, IUB chairperson and professor of computer science. “The E-Science work involves building distributed communities of collaborating scientists together in ways not previously considered possible.”

Gannon and Randall Bramley, IUB associate professor of computer science, will lead a project to create grid science portals that allow scientists and engineers to access and control remote resources and computations from their desktop machines in much the same way as when we use the World Wide Web to access banking and airline reservation systems.

The $182,000 project will help scientists who use computational grids in their research, but the benefits are general and will apply to many kinds of computing applications.

IU also is involved in a $3.1 million project to develop the Center for Component Technology for Terascale Simulation Software.

Other institutions involved are Argonne National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the universities of Tennessee, Maryland, Illinois and California-San Diego.

The second project will involve research into software component technology for high-performance parallel scientific computing and address problems of complexity, reuse and interoperability for scientific simulation software.

Over the lifetime of the projects, IU will receive about $2.5 million in grant funding through the DOE program.

SciDAC is an integrated program that will help create a new generation of scientific simulation codes. The codes will take full advantage of the extraordinary capabilities of terascale computers to address ever larger, more complex problems. The program also includes research on improved mathematical and computing systems software that will allow these codes to use modern parallel computers effectively and efficiently.

Another goal of the SciDAC program is the development of “collaboratory” software to enable geographically separated scientists to work together effectively as a team, to control scientific instruments remotely and to share data more readily.

“This innovative program will help us to find new energy sources for the future, understand the effect of energy production on our environment and learn more about the fundamental nature of energy and matter,” said Spencer Abraham, U.S. Secretary of Energy. “A major strength of many of the projects is a partnership between scientists at the Energy Department’s national laboratories and universities.”

“These projects represent a significant change in the way we do computational research, with greater emphasis on integrated teams,” said James Decker, acting director of the DOE’s Office of Science. “Our strategy is to support coordinated efforts by the scientists working to solve complex problems in physics, chemistry and biology and the applied mathematicians and computer scientists working to develop the computational tools required for that research.”

For a complete list of SciDAC awards, principal investigators and project descriptions:

http://www.science.doe.gov/scidac/