High performance computing is alive and well at the University of Minnesota. Because Minnesota was the hotbed of the supercomputing industry throughout the 80s and early 90s, the faculty and students in our department have been actively involved in this strategically important industry. The research areas cover the entire spectrum of supercomputing in our department, including parallel numerical algorithms, computation intensive non-numerical applications such as data mining, middleware for grid computing, system software, and machine architectures.
With the renewal of the Army High Performance Computing Research Center last year, and the presence of the state sponsored Minnesota Supercomputing Institute within the Digital Technology Center, the University boasts two high performance computing centers that serve its high performance computing research community extremely well. In this issue of our newsletter, we highlight some of the research activities in the area of parallel numerical algorithms. It is a timely article because the federal government recently renewed its support of this strategic research area due to its significance to our basic research in sciences and technologies and the intense competition from abroad.
We have also been working closely with our industrial partners since the early 80s, currently through the Industrial Partners Program. Industrial members meet regularly during the academic year with our faculty. The members are closely involved in various activities in the department, including organizing the department open house and research forums, sponsoring student activities such as the ACM student chapter and the Graduate Student Association, recruitment, offering internships to our best undergraduate and graduate students, and providing input to our curriculum issues. Many companies are also actively involved in and are sponsoring faculty research projects.
Our industrial partners have been among our strongest supporters and allies each year advocating the importance of our program to the University and to the State of Minnesota. In this newsletter, we are very pleased to have one of our industrial partners, Bill Rohde from Unisys, present his perspective on this important partnership between industry and our department. We hope more companies will recognize the unique opportunity this partnership can bring to both our department and our partners. For more information regarding our Industrial Partners Program, please visit the web site: http://www.cs.umn.edu/external/partners.html.
We are planning to hold our 4th Biennial Department of Computer Science and Engineering Technology Forum on Friday, October 17, 2003. This is an event that brings our alumni, industrial partners, students and faculty together to exchange ideas, showcase our accomplishments, present distinguished alumni awards, and have a great time together enjoying the fall colors on campus during the University.s homecoming week. We hope you will mark your calendar and join us for this years event.
-Pen-Chung Yew