This research effort includes facilities and support from:

• OBR Research Challenge grant on Algorithms and Techniques for the Solution, Visualization and Steering of the Solution of Large Nonlinear Problems on a High Bandwidth/Low Latency Network of High Performance Workstations

 

• Ohio Communication and Computing ATM Research Network
  The Ohio Communications and Computing ATM Research Network (OCARnet) is a recently funded project of the Ohio Board of Regents (OBOR) Investment Fund. This project established an ATM network in Ohio for the purpose of conducting state-of-the-art research in areas of high speed, high bandwidth networking and its applications. OCARnet will enable multiple research projects that are similar in scope to those specified in the stategic High Performance Communications and Computing Research Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

 

• DISCOVnet - A High-Performance Network for Distributed Computation and Visualization
  This instrumentation grant enabled the purchase of a number of visualization workstations and a Beowulf cluster, called Fianna, consisting of 32 dual-processor Pentium III/450 SMP nodes with SysKonnect Gigabit Ethernet cards connected by a high bandwidth, low latency Gigabit Ethernet network based on a Foundry BigIron IIGC Plus switch. These are used primarily for the following research projects: - Path Following, Visualization and Steering of Liquid Crystal Calculations - Distributed Operating Systems Research - Large Scalable Parallel Quantum Monte Carlo The equipment supports several research projects, involving work in distributed large scale scientific computation, computational steering and visualization, together with some work on distributed operating systems.

 

• A Steering and Visualization Environment This grant supports the PIs and graduate students to develop an environment for visualization and interactive computational steering on a network of distributed workstations. The visualization and steering front-end being implemented will be capable of interacting using a client-server model with a computational engine, which could also reside on a parallel computer, in addition to the distributed network of computers which is the main target architecture. The target application of this environment will be 3-dimensional liquid crystal material in a confined geometry. The model used will be based on the Landau-de Gennes theory. In particular, we are interested in the changes in the degree of order and orientation of the liquid crystals as the temperature is varied. Knowledge about the properties of liquid crystals is of importance, for example, for the design of liquid displays. The target application is characteristic of a class of problems which would benefit significantly from computational steering, since it has multiple solutions with different symmetry structures and exhibits bifurcation or turning-point behavior for certain values of the determining parameters. Hence this is a path following or continuation problem.

 

• vBNS Connection for Kent State. This award was made under the high performance connections portion of ANIR's "Connections to the Internet" announcement, NSF 96-64. It provides partial support for two years for a DS-3 connection to the vBNS. Applications include projects in large scalable parallel quantum Monte Carlo, liquid crystal research, distributed operating systems for high-speed networks, distributed computing, and several mathematics projects. Collaborating institutions include Arizona State, New York University, Courant Institute, Case Western Reserve, NIST, University of Virginia, University of California San Francisco, Georgetown, Stanford and Texas Tech.

 

• Cluster Based Computational Techniques for the Modelling of Problems Involving Bifurcations
  This project will address the needs of researchers involved in solving large nonlinear problems, which exhibit multiple solution paths, or large scale minimization problems, with multiple local minima that are to be followed as control parameters vary. It will develop a library of visualization and steering tools to address path following problems efficiently on Beowulf clusters and provide tools for optimization of the cluster communication. It will produce tools that are integrated with the CUMULVS steering and visualization environment. The software libraries will be open source and provided to the community of researchers and users.

 

• Scalable Communication Support on SMP Clusters for Network-Based Computing
  In this collaborative research with D.K. Panda from Ohio State University, we plan to consider the issues in providing fast and scalable communication support for SMP-based network-based computing systems, in particular, those involved in providing scalable communication support for SMP-based NBC systems; developing schemes for balancing computation, communication, and synchronization on such systems by taking the three-level hierarchy of communication into account; and studying application-level performance benefits of the proposed communication support.

 

• Advanced Liquid Crystalline Optical Materials NSF STC

 

This research initiative receives funding from and would like to thank:

Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Ohio Board of Regents (OBOR) or Kent State University.