Professor Vipin Kumar of the Computer Science and Engineering Department led a multi-university effort, which included several CS&E faculty members as well as faculty members from other I.T. departments, in a successful effort to renew the Army High Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC). The team consisting of Clark Atlanta University, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, Howard University, Jackson State University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of North Dakota won the eight-year $36 million award in a nation wide competition. The Computer Science and Engineering faculty who are part of this Center are Baoquan Chen, Ravi Janardan, George Karypis, Vipin Kumar, Shashi Shekhar, and Jon Weissman. Kumar will serve as the Director of the AHPCRC.

The AHPCRC will conduct basic research in the application of high performance computing to a variety of interdisciplinary computational science research topics of interest to the Army, including chemical and biological defense, energetic materials, signature modeling, and virtual computing environments for future combat system, as well as enabling technologies such as data mining and high-performance computational algorithms. The program provides a mechanism for AHPCRC researchers and students to closely interact with Army and other defense researchers as well as to access state-of-the-art high performance computing resources such as the CRAY T3E-1200, IBM RS6000s and other systems.

According to Kumar, the contract is due, in part, to the positive momentum the AHPCRC has created towards being a national leader in high performance computing research. "This is a clear recognition of the leadership role played by the AHPCRC in the area of high performance computing over the past 12 years," he said. "We are excited about the opportunity to continue our leading edge research in the areas of computational structural and fluid dynamics, environmental quality modeling, and enabling technologies as well as focus on new areas of great national importance such as chemical-biological defense and network intrusion detection."

-Vipin Kumar