CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

LSUWire - LSU Media Relations By Rob Anderson LSU has been chosen by the National Science Foundation to receive $3 million for an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship, or IGERT. This prestigious award to LSU comes after a highly competitive, two-phase selection process, in which some 550 initial proposal applications were presented to the NSF and only 20 recipients were ultimately selected. According to the NSF, the IGERT program is designed to offer training for doctoral-level graduate students, in order to provide them with "the interdisciplinary background and the technical, professional and personal skills needed to address the global questions of the future." Each institution designs its own IGERT program for doctoral students and submits it for acceptance by the NSF. These programs are meant to "give graduates the edge needed to become leaders in their chosen fields," by making use of innovative curricula and internships, and by focusing on multidisciplinary, problem-centered training. LSU's IGERT program will be a unique, multidisciplinary program that will require "collaboration between engineers, biological and physical scientists and computational scientists" and will focus on computational fluid dynamics, or CFD, which involves the use of computers and computer simulations to study fluids – liquids and gases – in motion, and the effect of the fluid motion on boundaries, such as solid containers or other fluids. CFD has applications in many different fields, ranging from engineering to medicine. Much of the current computational fluid dynamics research at LSU involves using LSU's supercomputer, SuperMike. For example, simulations of ocular fluid dynamics are being performed, which could lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms that lead to glaucoma. This work is being headed up by mechanical engineering professor Sumanta Acharya, who is the principal investigator for LSU's IGERT proposal. LSU's IGERT program will integrate 12 different disciplines from the Colleges of Engineering, Basic Sciences and Arts & Sciences, as well as the School of the Coast and Environment and the Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT. Key CFD applications that will be emphasized in the IGERT program will include: biological/bio-medical flows, astrophysical flows, oceanic/coastal flows, reservoir flows and fluid transport in engineering systems. The IGERT program will provide annual stipends of $30,000 per year to the graduate students for two years, to pay for their tuition. The program will also arrange international and industrial internships for the students, in order to broaden their educational and cultural experiences. Some 30 doctoral students are expected to graduate from LSU's interdisciplinary IGERT over the course of five years. According to Acharya, the program will "train the next generation of computational fluid dynamicists to take advantage of the rapid advances in computer and networking infrastructure" and to "solve 'grand challenge' fluid dynamical problems using an integrated approach." "The IGERT CFD doctoral students will represent a cross-product of their counterparts in the physical sciences and computational sciences," said Acharya. "This designation by the NSF recognizes the strength of the computational fluid dynamics and the computational sciences programs at LSU and positions LSU to be a leader in developing the next generation of computational software for multi-scale fluid dynamical problems." "It is very exciting to have this multi-disciplinary program recognized by the NSF," said Harold Silverman, interim vice chancellor for research and graduate studies. "It provides us with the opportunity to recruit some of the best graduate students from around the country to participate in this unique research and training opportunity." LSU's Center for Computation & Technology will play a crucial role in the IGERT program, because CCT researchers are developing software for enabling the kind of large scale parallel computing and visualization that will be required for the CFD research. "This is exactly the kind of initiative that the CCT wants to support. IGERT makes use of our center, and it's the right environment to build activities in computational science," said Edward Seidel, director of CCT. "CFD is fundamental to many applications that the CCT will develop with the campus, including coastal studies, biological systems, nano science and astrophysics." The co-principal investigators of the IGERT program are physics and astronomy Professor Joel Tohline, mechanical engineering Professor Dimitris Nikitopoulos, mathematics Professor Blaise Bourdin and Professor Gabrielle Allen from computer science and the CCT. More than 20 other faculty are expected to participate in this inter-disciplinary program. In addition, the Eye Center in the LSU Health Sciences Center will collaborate in the bio-medical effort, and both Southern University and Louisiana Tech will participate in the data mining and visualization training and research. LSU and its partner schools will soon be connected by LONI, a 40Gbit optical network on the national LambdaRail. According to Acharya, this will put them in a unique position to address the challenges of "large scale distributed computing of fluid flows." "This prestigious award will enhance interdisciplinary research activities in the College of Engineering," said Zaki Bassiouni, dean of the College of Engineering. "Recruitment and retention of outstanding graduate students that explore boundaries outside their specific disciplines will lead to insightful and worthwhile research. "The ultimate goal of these IGERT activities is the contribution to the economic development of the state and the nation, and we are pleased that the College of Engineering will play a significant role in this endeavor." For more information on the IGERT program at LSU, contact Acharya at 225-578-5809 or acharya@me.lsu.edu.