Archives
Miller one of "top to watch" in high-performance computing
Director of CCR cited by top Web publication HPCwire
By ELLEN GOLDBAUM
Contributing Editor
The top Web publication dedicated to news in high-performance computing has named Russ Miller, UB Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, as one of its 2003 "top people to watch" in the field.
The list in HPCwire is a veritable "who's who" of the key players in high-performance computing in private industry, government laboratories and academic institutions.
Nineteen people and organizations from around the globe were included on the list, which has been posted at http://www.tgc.com/hpcwire/features/topwatch03.html.
Miller directs UB's supercomputing center, the Center for Computational Research, which HPCwire cited as having "carved out a very nice niche in supporting computation and visualization."
"Dr. Miller was very strongly recommended to us by a high-ranking National Science Foundation official for doing phenomenal stuff in scientific computing and visualization," said Thomas Tabor, HPCwire publisher.
During the past year, CCR was selected for a number of major achievements.
In November, the much-heralded top 500 list http://www.top500.org, the gold standard of supercomputer rankings, ranked UB's newest, general-purpose Pentium4-based Dell cluster as the 22nd fastest individual supercomputer in the world.
Last fall, UB received the first Dell Centers for Research Excellence Award from Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Computer Corp., who came to CCR to announce a second Dell cluster, one of the world's largest clusters of Linux servers, a 4000+-processor PentiumIII-based system installed in the CCR.
These two Dell clusters, coupled with other CCR resources, resulted in UB being listed as the eighth largest supercomputing site in the world, according to http://www.gapcon.com.
Miller said that over the past four years, the demand for high-performance computing and high-end visualization at UB has justified an increase in computational power from a total initial capacity of 64 million operations per second to a total capacity of nine trillion operations per second. In addition, CCR's high-end visualization and related display technologies also have been enhanced significantly.
Supercomputers at CCR now can process in a single year what it would take a typical PC nine millennia to compute. Equivalently, these supercomputers can process in a single day what a standard PC would need 24 years to process.
The purchase of the Dell clusters is part of a major expansion at the center, which has increased the size of its machine room from 1,200 to 6,500 square feet and more than doubled its technical staff with the addition of 10 new full-time scientists and programmers.
The tremendous computational power available through CCR is focused primarily on activities in Western New York, benefiting research at UB, as well as corporate and institutional partners. The resources are used to support the UB Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics, which is merging high-end technologies such as supercomputing with expertise in genomics, proteomics, bioimaging and pharmaceutical sciences to foster advances in science and health care.
"The Center for Computational Research supports nearly 100 projects at UB, as well as dozens of projects with our institutional and industrial partners," explained Miller. "CCR's users, who are located predominantly in Western New York, have access to world-class computational resources in terms of hardware, software and support infrastructure," he said.
"The UB administration has been tremendously supportive of high-end computational research, which provides an opportunity for Buffalo's scientific community to perform world-class research and helps to retain top-notch scientists in Western New York, recruit more world-class scientists to the area and attract increased levels of funding and higher quality students, all of which further enhances the caliber of research at UB and throughout Western New York."
Miller has performed groundbreaking research in parallel algorithms and architectures. He and researchers at the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute have taken the Shake-and-Bake method and created a computer program called SnB that is used worldwide to solve complicated molecular structures.