High-performance computing workshop draws 175

National experts from academia, government and industry met at Lehigh this week to discuss what S. David Wu, dean of the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science, calls the third pillar in the modern arena of scientific inquiry.

A total of 175 people, including Lehigh faculty and students, attended the university’s first workshop on high-performance computing (HPC), which was held Monday and Tuesday, Oct. 5-6, and sponsored by the engineering college.

The workshop was titled Computational Engineering and Science/HPC: Enabling New Discoveries.

Wu, who welcomed the workshop participants, said HPC, theory and experimentation make up the three pillars of scientific investigation. Advanced computational techniques, he said, enable researchers to build and test mathematical models of extremely complex phenomena, and analyze huge quantities of data—often at a fraction of the cost and time required by more traditional laboratory methods.

The workshop featured six sessions, five plenary addresses, four panel discussions, and a poster session and student poster competition. A total of 22 students entered the competition. Eight faculty and staff members from Lehigh and other universities also presented posters.

Three student poster winners

Edward Kim, a Lehigh graduate student in computer science and engineering, won first place in the poster competition for a poster titled Interactive Segmentation Using Cellular Automata and CUDA. Kim is advised by Xiaolei Huang, the P.C. Rossin Assistant Professor of computer science and engineering.

Second place in the competition went to Michail Stamatakis, a graduate student from the University of Delaware, for a poster titled Quantifying Stochastic Effects on an Artificial lac Operon Genetic Network.

Pingping Xiu, a Lehigh graduate student in computer science and engineering, took third place for a poster titled Whole-Book Recognition Using High-Performance Computing. Xiu is advised by Henry S. Baird, professor of computer science and engineering.

Plenary addresses at the workshop were given by Jose Munoz, acting director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure; Donald W. Brenner, the Kobe Steel Distinguished Professor of materials science and engineering at North Carolina State University; Robert J. Vanderbei, chair of operations research and financial engineering at Princeton University; Mihai Anitescu, a computational mathematician at Argonne national Laboratory; and Gerhard Hummer, chief of the National Institutes of Health’s Theoretical Biophysics Section.

Session topics included data mining, energy and the environment, bioengineering and biosciences, computational modeling, computational optimization, and signal processing.

The panel discussions covered funding opportunities in HPC, Computation Enabling Information Sciences, HPC in Physical Sciences and Engineering, and Computational Training and Grad Programs.

The workshop was chaired by Tamas Terlaky, department chair and George N. and Soteria Kledaras ’87 Endowed Professor of industrial and systems engineering. Terlaky was recently invited to give the 12th Annual Simon Stevin Lecture on Optimization in Engineering in Belgium.

The three workshop co-chairs were Brian D. Davison, associate professor of computer science and engineering; Slava V. Rotkin, associate professor of physics; and Brandon Leeds of Library and Technology Services.

For more information, please visit the workshop’s website.