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Computational Science/Engineering Research Institute
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Michigan Tech has a new research institute.
The Computational Science and Engineering Research Institute, established this fall, provides a home for interdepartmental science and engineering research that requires powerful computers.
Current research areas include modeling processes in the atmosphere, environmental protection problems and a new language for programming supercomputers, among others. Phillip Merkey, a research assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, is the institute's first director.
The institute acquired two high-powered computer systems this fall. A 60-processor Cray T3E supercomputer will support research being conducted at Michigan Tech, the University of California at Berkeley, George Washington University and several other sites off campus.
A new Beowulf cluster, a type of parallel computer linking many PCs and dedicated to running high-speed computations, has been acquired through a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation grant.
In addition, several other medium-scale computational systems are available to institute researchers. The computer systems are located in the Center for Experimental Computation, in Fisher Hall.
Before the institute was formed, computational science and engineering projects at Michigan Tech had already received more than $1 million in funding. Since then, Assistant Professor Adrian Sandu (Computer Science) has received a $450,000 National Science Foundation Information Technology Research Award to help develop better models for tracking atmospheric pollution.
In addition, Associate Professor Steven Seidel (Computer Science) will use a $113,000 Hewlett-Packard award to support technology development for the Unified Parallel C (UPC) programming language, and Merkey has received a $150,000 Earth and Space Science Award from NASA.
The research institute also supports the nondepartmental Computational Science and Engineering PhD program, which prepares students in various disciplines to solve complex computational problems.
The program is unique at MTU, since any department granting doctoral degrees may award the PhD in Computational Science and Engineering. The program currently enrolls graduate students in the computer science, geological engineering and sciences and mathematical science departments.
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