Congratulations to Rahul Kashyap (EAS Ph.D. '17) who won the best student talk at the 20th Eastern Gravity Meeting hosted by the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos at Penn State. Rahul's talk "Type Ia Supernovae through Spiral Instability in Binary White Dwarf Mergers" describes his recent work simulating white dwarf mergers on some of the nation's largest supercomputers. "

Congratulations to our recent CSCVR graduates Rahul Kashyap (EAS Ph.D. '17), Tazkera Haque (Masters '17), and Chris Bresten (EAS Ph.D. '17). Rahul has accepted an offer to work after graduation as a postdoctoral research scholar jointly at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (also known as the Albert Einstein Institute) in Hanover, Germany. Tazkera will be continuing her studies as a Judy Young PhD Fellow at UMass Amherst. Chris has accepted a postdoctoral fellow position at Bentley.

Ph.D student Zack Grants paper Explicit Strong Stability Preserving Multistage Two-Derivative Time-Stepping Schemes was selected as one of the winners of the 2017 SIAM Student Paper Prize. There are 3 prizes each year and each is given a $1000 prize and $500 in travel support to the SIAM annual meeting. Zach will present the winning paper in a special session at the SIAM annual meeting. The paper was co-authored by CSCVR faculty member Sigal Gottlieb and collaborators Andrew J. Christlieb and David C. Seal.

Research conducted in the Center on crystals, black holes, supernovae and estuaries are among the papers published at UMass Dartmouth included in the 2016 Nature Index (*). The Nature Index, developed by the Nature Publishing Group, tracks research publications among a selection of 68 high-impact journals. According to the Nature Publishing Group

Dr. Amit Tandon (Mechanical Engineering), who was recently awarded a $753,841 grant from the Office of Naval Research to study monsoon in the Indian Ocean and over the Asian land mass in partnership with several other U.S. institutions as well as institutions in India and Sri Lanka.

UMass Dartmouth Center for Scientific Computing and Visualization Research will acquire a new rapid prototyping machine, a powerful computer server intended for use in collaborative multidisciplinary research among faculty members and students from different departments with diverse programming background. The new rapid prototyping server (rps) is a single high-end Linux server with 3.2 GHz multicore Xeon CPUs, 256GB RAM, and can handle up to 4 GPUs. Popular rapid prototyping software such as anaconda python 2 and 3, Julia, MATLAB with parallel computing toolbox, and Mathematica with GPU support will also be installed. With convenient feature such as UMassD logon, the server can also be seen as an extension of faculty's office workstations or as a test machine prior to scaling up computing jobs to UMass Dartmouth multinode servers: ARNiE and HPCC or MGHPCC (UMass-wide supercomputer). The older rapid prototyping server will be repurposed as a machine for teaching introduction to scientific computing (MTH280), mathematical and computational consulting (MTH540), and high performance scientific computing (EAS520) courses. Prototyping projects currently conducted on the older machine includes but not limited to deep learning with Mathematica, numerical simulation of systems of PDEs, development of new time-stepping methods, and preconditioning techniques for generalized finite difference sparse systems. Smooth transition from older to new rps system will be expected in the summer of 2017.

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's Center for Scientific Computing & Visualization Research (CSCVR) has contributed 120 GPU servers to the UMass shared computational cluster installed at the MGHPCC (full article here)

The UMass shared cluster at the MGHPCC is a large (~15,000) processor-core supercomputer system that serves the entire UMass system's computational scientists. From astrophysicists at the Amherst and Dartmouth campuses, to biomedical researchers at Worcester, this key central facility provides the computational resources needed to advance world-class research programs across the system. While a large number of processors is the most common way to build powerful supercomputers today; lately advances in graphics processors (GPUs) has allowed them to be used as accelerators for scientific calculations often delivering a speed-up of over an order-of-magnitude.

Rahul Kashyap (EAS Ph.D. '17) has accepted an offer to work after graduation as a postdoctoral research scholar jointly at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (also known as the Albert Einstein Institute) in Hanover, Germany, and the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in Bengaluru, India. During his Ph.D. studies at UMass Dartmouth, Rahul investigated the nature of a class of exploding stars, or supernovae, using some of the largest supercomputers in the world. Rahul was supported on a Distinguished Doctoral Fellowship provided by the Graduate Studies Office, the Physics and Mathematics Department and the Center for Scientific Computing and Visualization Research. Please see the University's press release to learn more about Rahul's research.

CSCVR Directors, Prof. Sigal Gottlieb and Prof. Gaurav Khanna are serving as guest editors for a special issue of the well-established IEEE / AIP journal Computing in Science & Engineering. The special issue is titled ”Supercomputing-Enabled Advances in Science & Engineering” and will publish papers that report on impactful advances enabled by large-scale computing in any area of science or engineering. All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed.

Full details are available here.