Contact: Jim Laird
A workshop funded by the National Science Foundation and coordinated by Mississippi State University and Purdue University is bringing together the country's leading cyber-infrastructure experts next week.
Beginning Monday [July 15], researchers will gather in Arlington, Va., to explore the field's multi-faceted challenges.
"We're really excited to have recruited several of the top cyber-infrastructure faculty in the nation, in addition to select NSF program directors, to give keynote lectures on their research and education in cyber-infrastructure," said Suzanne Shontz, the project's co-principal investigator and an assistant professor of mathematics and statistics at Mississippi State.
"Several of the NSF CAREER awardees who attended our first annual CyberBridges workshop are returning to the workshop this year. This is due, in large part, to the excellent talks and leadership provided by the nationally- and internationally-acclaimed faculty who spoke at last year's workshop. We expect great things from this year's workshop," she explained.
In addition to keynote sessions and follow-up discussions, there will be a poster session for attendees to present work from their prestigious NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program Awards, commonly known as the CAREER Awards. Poster topics include high-performance computing, parallel computing and distributed storage systems, fault tolerance and error detection, and data visualization.
"Over the past decade, cyber-infrastructure has become an essential element of modern research built on distributed interdisciplinary research groups," said Thomas Hacker, the project's principal investigator and an associate professor of computer and information technology at Purdue.
"The workshop will bring together the community of cyber-infrastructure focused CAREER awardees with leading researchers working to advance the frontiers of interdisciplinary research, computational- and data-enabled research, visualization, high performance computing and education," he said.
The NSF's Division of Advanced Computing Infrastructure is underwriting the two-day event.
Keynote speakers include:
--Brian I. Athey, collegiate professor and inaugural chair of the Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan Medical School;
--Omar Ghattas, the John A. and Katherine G. Jackson Chair in Computational Geosciences, professor of geological sciences and mechanical engineering, and director of the Center for Computational Geosciences in the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin;
--William Gropp, Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science, Computer Science Department; director, Parallel Computing Institute; deputy director for research, Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies at University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign;
--Chandrajit Bajaj, director, Center for Computational Visualization, Institute for Computational and Engineering Sciences and professor of computer sciences at University of Texas at Austin; and,
--Steven I. Gordon, interim co-executive director, Ohio Supercomputer Center.
For more information about the workshop, see http://www.ccs.msstate.edu/conferences/NSFcyberbridges2013
Mississippi State is online at www.msstate.edu.