Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies

Congratulations to Professor Sanjay Kale and the rest of the Charm++ team in Kale's Parallel Programming Laboratory. Charm++ was a finalist for the productivity-oriented HPC Challenge award and won HPC Challenge class II in the performance sub-category at the Supercomputing 2011 conference!

University of Illinois computer science professor Bill Gropp was one of the driving forces behind the launch of a new ACM Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing. Gropp and several others founded the group to address the needs of students, faculty, and practitioners of high performance computing. SIGHPC is the first such group within a major professional society to address this emerging and important topic in computing.

An Illinois team led by Professor Praveen Kumar will help to develop better methods for data-sharing in the new and growing field of sustainability. The work is part of a cooperative effort by four major universities, led by the School of Information at the University of Michigan and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) with a two-year, $2 million grant.

University of Ilinois' biophysicist Klaus Schulten has been named a 2012 Fellow of the Biophysical Society in honor of his groundbreaking effort to develop computational molecular biology as an important tool to solve problems in biophysics. Fellows will be honored during the Biophysical Society’s 56th Annual Meeting on Feb. 27, 2012, in San Diego.

Guitarist/composer Bill Frisell and experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison will premiere "The Great Flood," a 75-minute multimedia work of original music and film inspired by the 1927 Mississippi River floods, on Sept. 10 at ELLNORA | The Guitar Festival at the University of Illinois' Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Illinois data visualization experts collaborated with Morrison on the film, creating data-driven visualizations of the Mississippi River Valley.

Ben Smith recently began a post-doc position with the Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies after earning his doctor of musical arts degreefrom the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the spring.

The Illinois Informatics PhD program is a unique research degree defined by innovative application and invention of computational methods to advance existing or newly created fields of inquiry. Program areas include Art and Cultural Informatics, which is lead by IACAT affiliate Guy Garnett and includes IACAT's Donna Cox as a faculty member.

Students in Guy Garnett's spring course created games to teach chemistry concepts, competing for a cash award for the best game.

Illinois researchers Marc Snir, Bill Gropp and Peter Kogge have published a white paper about achieving exascale performance and the research required to reach that critical milestone.