The Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) at Rome, NY has granted UMass Dartmouth's new Center for Scientific Computing and Visualization Research (CSCDR) four full racks (176 units) of Sony PlayStation 3s for research computing. UMass Dartmouth pioneered the use of PS3s for astrophysics research back in 2007 when Prof. Khanna of the Physics Dept. created a compute cluster of 16 PS3s and ran his black hole research simulations at supercomputer-level performance. In 2011, the US Air Force commissioned a similar, but much larger system (1,760 PS3s) called CONDOR for a wide range of military and academic uses.

Under a federal CRADA agreement, AFRL has now granted a portion of CONDOR to UMass Dartmouth for further exploration of such novel computational technologies for the purposes of scientific high-performance computing. See some pictures of the cluster: Picture 1, Picture 2, Picture 3. For more details, see The PS3 Gravity Grid.

The Center for Scientific Computing and Visualization announces a fall workshop presenting advances in scientific computing at UMassD. The workshop is scheduled for September 17, and September 24, 2013 and will be held in Textiles 105. Details are available on the workshop webpage.

Principal Investigator Sigal Gottlieb, in collaboration with faculty at UMass Dartmouth, UMass Lowell, UMass Amherst, and MIT, has been awarded a grant for "Simulation and Visualization Approaches to Big Data". The award in the amount of $150,000 was made by the UMass President. Full announcement:
http://www.massachusetts.edu/news/news.cfm?mode=detail&news_id=2222

Principal Investigator Akil Narayan and Co-Principal Investigator Alfa Heryudono are recipients of federal award number 1318427 from the National Science Foundation for "Computation of crowded geodesics on the universal Teichmüller space for planar shape matching in computer vision".

Principal Investigator Mehdi Raessi is the recipient of federal award number 1336232 from the National Science Foundation for "Collaborative Research: Analysis and design of textured super-hydrophobic surfaces capable of preventing ice formation on wind turbine blades".