CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

LSU Today By Rob Anderson LSU Assistant Professor of Computer Science Bijaya Bahadur Karki recently received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award for a project titled “Rheology of Materials of Earth’s Mantle: High-end Computational/Visualization Research and Education.” The award amount is close to a half million dollars over five years, beginning June 1. The NSF CAREER Award is the Foundation’s most prestigious award for junior faculty members. It is part of the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, which “recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.” CAREER Award recipients are selected on the basis of creative career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the missions of their institutions. Karki joined the faculty at LSU in early 2003. His research interests are in scientific computing and visualization and he has published more than 25 journal papers in these areas. For his NSF-funded project, Karki plans to develop a metacomputing and visualization framework to address challenging problems related to the materials that are known or believed to make up the Earth’s interior. He will carry out large-scale simulations to investigate the rheological properties – the deformation and flow of matter, including its elasticity, plasticity and viscosity – of the component oxide and silicate materials at the ultra-high pressure and temperature conditions found deep underneath the earth’s surface. The results will provide insight into the structure and dynamics of the otherwise inaccessible deep interior of the planet, and, hence, insight into the various geophysical activities such as plate tectonics, sea level rise and fall, earthquake generation and volcanic eruptions. “This NSF CAREER Award has provided me with a unique opportunity to promote cross-fertilization of Earth materials research on one hand and computer science on the other, which should be a benefit to both fields,” Karki said, adding that he believes that his project is the kind of high-end computation that will greatly benefit from LSU’s supercomputer, SuperMike, and the Superhelix Linux clusters. Karki received his doctorate in computational physics from the University of Edinburgh (U.K.) and a diploma with honors from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. Before taking a faculty position in LSU’s Department of Computer Science, he worked as a research scholar at the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute for Digital Simulation and Advanced Computation and in LSU’s Biological Computation and Visualization Center.