Gaurav Khanna, Associate Professor in the Physics Department and Associate Director of the Center for Scientific Computing and Visualization Research (CSCDR), is featured in a New York Times article for his work. Dr. Khanna's research features the construction of PlayStation-powered supercomputers, and their use in black hole simulations.

UMass HPC day is a showcase of computational research within the UMass system, featuring speakers from five UMass schools, and industry leaders. The event is organized by the CSCDR, and will be held at the ATMC on the UMass Dartmouth campus.

All are welcome but registration (free) is required. More information can be found on the CSCDR site: Link

The RC5 cryptography challenge (Wikipedia) was originally started by RSA Laboratories as a worldwide contest to decode a cipher by finding the secret cryptographic key using a brute-force approach. The 72-bit version of the same contest continues today, conducted by distributed.net -- one of the oldest open public distributed computing projects on the internet.

Professor Gaurav Khanna of the Physics Department and associate director of the Center for Scientific Computing and Visualization Research (CSCDR), and computer technician Glenn Volkema, have built a novel supercomputer using consumer video-gaming components (over a hundred Sony PlayStations and multiple AMD Radeon graphics-cards) that has enabled the campus' rank to soar to the absolute top of the RC5-72 contest participant list (link).



This unique system is generating approximately 50 billion keys per second and is slated to have a 1 in 10 chance for winning the contest all by itself!

The supercomputer has been built to study various astrophysical problems associated to binary black hole systems and gravitational radiation. Physics Department graduate students, Tyler Spilhaus and William Duff are already utilizing the system extensively for their research projects in this context. In addition, Computer and Information Science major, Violet Pfeiffer will be using the system to study different aspects of cryptography and cybersecurity.

Space.com has published an article featuring CSCDR Associate Director Gaurav Khanna's research. Dr. Khanna's work focuses on using computational methods for astrophysics, and seeks to understand how black holes interact with other stars and other black holes.

See the full Space.com story about Dr. Khanna's work, which incorporates high-performance supercomputers, advanced computational algorithms, and state-of-the-art astrophysical modeling.

Principal investigator Bo Dong is the recipient of federal award number 1419029 from the National Science Foundation for "Development of superconvergent hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin methods and mixed methods for Korteweg-de Vries type equations".

Principal investigator Cheng Wang is the recipient of federal award number 1418689 from the National Science Foundation for "Highly efficient and accurate numerical schemes for nonlinear gradient flows with energy stability".

Principal investigator Gaurav Khanna is the recipient of federal award number 1414440 from the National Science Foundation for "An Evaluation of Video-Gaming Technologies for Scientific High-Performance Computing in Gravitational Physics".

Principal investigator Mazdak Tootkaboni is the receipt of federal award number 1401575 from the National Science Foundation for "Collaborative Research: Optimal Design of Flaw-tolerant Structures and Material Microarchitectures via Stochastic Topology Optimization."

Sung Hoon Kim is the receipient of the first Engineering and Applied Sciences Ph.D. from UMassD under direction of Physcis Professor Jong-Ping Hsu.

Dr. Kim's thesis is entitled "Investigation of the Graviton Self-Energy with General Gauge in Yang-Mills Gravity". See the full press release for details.

Associate Professor Gaurav Khanna builds low-cost supercomputer, performance comparable to nearly 3000 processor-cores of typical laptop or desktop.

Physics professor and CSCDR associate director Gaurav Khanna has built an extremely low-cost supercomputer using 176 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) gaming consoles installed in a refrigerated shipping container "reefer" of large cooling capability on the UMassD campus. The PS3 cluster is currently being used by UMass Dartmouth's Center for Scientific Computing and Visualization Research (CSCDR) to perform large and complex calculations in the context of black hole astrophysics, and also explore vulnerabilities in cybersecurity. See the full press release for details.

Sidafa Conde, a CSCDR graduate student, has been named a 2014-2015 XSEDE scholar.

XSEDE scholars are awarded support to hone research skills in high-performance and scientific computing.

Andrew Davey, recipient of the Ben L. Fryrear Fellowship in Computational Science, will pursue graduate studies at The Colorado School of Mines.

Ed McClain will pursue graduate studies in numerical relativity in the Astrophysics program at Louisiana State University.

CSCDR faculty member Dr. Mazdak Tootkaboni has been awarded an NSF CAREER grant, federal award number 1351742 for "CAREER: Predictive Analysis of Stability-Critical Structures: an Uncertainty-Informed Path from Measurements to Theory." CAREER Awards are the "National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations."

The CSCDR announces a workshop series for the software packages Pseudopack and WENO-pack. The workshop will be held on March 5 and 6, 2014, and will be facilitated by Professor Wai Sun Don from the Ocean University of China. Details can be found on the workshop homepage