Two screenings of Interstellar took place on the day of Dr. Thorne's visit to the Dartmouth campus. Dr. Thorne, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus at Caltech, joined UMass Dartmouth faculty, students, and the local community for a series of talks and a panel discussion on the science of Interstellar. The talks can be viewed on the event's webpage.

CSCDR undergraduate Cole Freniere, along with CSCDR faculty members Ashish Pathak, Mehdi Raessi and Gaurav Khanna, explore Amazon's Cloud Computing resources for the simulation of Ocean Wave Energy Converters interacting with ocean waves. These wave energy converters are complex to simulate, and traditionally require a large supercomputer to run for an extended period of time. Amazon, whom we all know for its large online store, also offers computing resources in the Cloud, which customers can essentially rent". The novel cloud computing model offers the possibility of reducing the cost of computational fluid dynamic simulations and unlocking the potential of wave energy converters as a future source of renewable energy.

To read more about Cole's research on Ocean Wave Energy Converters and cloud computing, please see Going into the Cloud to Study Renewable Energy Extraction from Ocean Waves. This project was made possible with support from the National Science Foundation (CBET Grant No. 1236462)."

The Center for Scientific Computing and Visualization Research would like to acknowledge the 98th birthday of Katherine Johnson on August 26.2016. Katherine Johnson was a pioneering African American woman in the field of computational mathematics. Her work at NASA over many decades had major impact in computational space science.

To read more about Katherine Johnson, please see the wikipedia page or watch this film.

Today, major advances in nearly all types of science and engineering are aided by computation. Indeed, high-performance computing (HPC) or supercomputing is now considered as the third pillar of scientific discovery alongside experiment and theory. Massachusetts universities (both public and private) excel in this emerging area and have a strong and diverse group of computational scientists and engineers across each campus.

UMass Dartmouth’s Center for Scientific Computing & Visualization Research (CSCDR) organized and hosted “HPC Day 2016” on May 17th — a conference to showcase compute intensive research from researchers in this community from all over Massachusetts. There were participants from: Northeastern University, Boston University, MIT, UMass Amherst, Dartmouth & Lowell and even industry. A special poster session with awards for student projects was included as well. This conference was a follow-on event from the inaugural “UMass HPC Day” conference hosted at UMass Dartmouth in 2014.

The event featured a total of 11 talks with topics ranging from engineering microbial systems to renewable energy extraction from the ocean. Over 145 attendees registered in this event in total and 30 student posters were presented. More details on the program may be found on the CSCDR website. Six awards were granted that were made possible via generous donations by Nvidia, SIAM and MathWorks. The conference lunch was sponsored by Microway Inc.

The keynote speaker was Dr. Jeremy Kepner from MIT Lincoln Lab who gave an fascinating and deeply engaging lecture titled “Interactive Supercomputing for High Performance Data Analysis.” The event also featured an interactive Education Panel that included stakeholders from industry and academia to discuss issues associated with HPC education and training.

The CSCDR also used this event to debut a new innovative, prototype supercomputer built entirely of mobile-devices (in particular, Nvidia Tegra X1 components used to build tablets) dubbed “Elroy”. The system’s total compute capacity is 16 Tflop/s and consumes just over 300W total power. The unique feature of this 32-node system is its extremely high power efficiency -- an order-of-magnitude larger than traditional systems. This was made possible by leveraging recent, very significant power-efficiency related advances that have been cleverly engineered into current cell phones and other mobile devices (to prolong battery life). Power-efficiency is a limiting feature in large scale supercomputing as well, due to the expense associated to large power consumption and corresponding cooling requirements. Elroy demonstrates a unique approach towards potentially meeting this challenge. This project was a result of a collaborative effort between the CSCDR and UMass Dartmouth CITS. The CSCDR has a history of developing innovative supercomputers from using gaming consoles to more recently, using video-gaming graphics cards.

The CSCDR provides undergraduate and graduate students with high quality, discovery-based educational experiences that transcend the traditional boundaries of academic fields, and foster collaborative research in the computational sciences. The CSCDR's computational resources are being utilized to solve complex problems in the sciences ranging from the modeling of ocean waves to uncovering the mysteries of black hole physics.

Please check the conference webpage fore more details including sample pictures of the day.

The CSCDR is in the process of accepting an in-kind "SwitchBlade" grant from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The granted equipment consists of an HP SwitchBlade Center chassis that contains the required power and networking infrastructure to support up to 16 high-end blade servers for high-performance computing. Two servers are included in this grant, leaving room for straightforward and low-cost expansion in the future. The granted hardware is valued at $95K.

With the two included servers, the system currently has 64 Intel Xeon E5 processor cores, 512 GB main memory, 2 TB storage connected via a high-speed network.

This grant is a result of efforts made by Glenn Volpe (HPE) and CSCDR Associate Director Professor Gaurav Khanna on behalf of the CSCDR. The SwitchBlade system is currently being leveraged to attract new top-notch faculty to the university. These faculty and their students will be affiliated with the CSCDR.

The center periodically holds conference showcasing compute intensive research at the UMass system. This year's version extends to several members of the MGHPCC.

Here is the conference webpage.

Here is the UMassOnTheMove article about the event.

The Center for Scientific Computing and Visualization Research welcomes renowned physicist Dr. Kip Thorne on March 29. Sponsoring the event together with the departments of mathematics and physics, the center has arranged a series of events including a reception, mini-lectures, and a panel discussion. See the poster for more details.

Dr. Thorne, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus at Caltech, is the originator and guiding hand of the 2014 blockbuster movie Interstellar. The movie is based on black holes and spatial wormholes which are the focus research areas of a few center affiliates'. Dr. Thorne will join UMass Dartmouth Physics faculty Robert Fisher, David Kagan, Gaurav Khanna, Richard Price, and School for Marine Science & Technology (SMAST) Professor Geoff Cowles in the Claire T. Carney Library Stoico/FIRSTFED Charitable Foundation Grand Reading Room at 4:30 p.m. for a reception followed by a series of talks at 5 p.m. and a panel discussion at 6 p.m. on the science of Interstellar. The night ends with a screening of the movie Interstellar at 7pm.

Read the full UMassD news release.

Physicists Lior Burko at Georgia Gwinnett College, Gaurav Khanna at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and Anil Zenginoglu at the University of Maryland have published a Rapid Communication in Physical Review D , that includes the first computer simulation of the interior of a rotating black hole.

New mathematical and computational techniques had to be developed to perform the simulations accurately. The high-precision computations involved were particularly intensive, requiring the novel GPU-supercomputing resources of the CSCDR. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

The Center for Scientific Computing & Visualization Research (CSCDR) promotes the mission of UMass Dartmouth by providing undergraduate and graduate students with high quality discovery-based educational experiences that transcend the traditional boundaries of academic field or department, and foster collaborative research in the computational sciences within the university and with researchers at other universities, national labs, and industry. Khanna serves as the associate director of the CSCDR.

Read the full Forbes story and UMassD press release

Link to the paper