Stephen David Beck and Thomas Sterling, professors at LSU, have received $1 Million of federal grant money for their “Center for Digital Innovation” proposal, which will further research into next-generation digital media and supercomputing architectures.  On the media side, it will be used in the AVATAR Initiative (Arts, Visualization, Advanced Technologies and Research) to create an academic research program specializing in digital media, animation, video games, music, and digital art.  On the supercomputing side, they’ll be working with various DARPA groups to develop execution models, APIs, and system software for Exascale Computing.

“With the additional funding our proposal has received through federal appropriations, we’re able to advance the research initiatives already taking place on campus and catalyze efforts within the digital media group and the supercomputer architecture group to expand work in both areas and create new opportunities,” Beck said.

A big win for LSU, although $1 Million really is a paltry sum for what could be “the future of supercomputing technology”.  It’s also an odd mix of work, Digital Media and Supercomputing.  I believe it was a political decision, to improve their odds of winning the grant.

I’ll be attending a presentation by Dr Sterling tomorrow on Exascale Computing, so maybe I’ll hear some details about what he plans to do with his share of the grant.

Full release after the break.

LSU Professors Receive $1 Million in Federal Funding To Advance Digital Media and Computational Science Research
BATON ROUGE – LSU Professors Stephen David Beck and Thomas Sterling received $1 million as part of the appropriations in the United States Senate Omnibus Appropriations Bill for their “Center for Digital Innovation” proposal, which furthers research in next-generation digital media and supercomputer architecture.
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who is a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, was instrumental in securing this and other funding for Louisiana.
“The LSU Center for Digital Innovation is at the forefront of the growth in technology jobs in Louisiana,” said Sen. Landrieu. “The funds for this project will help to build LSU’s role in the development and production of digital media and keep the state on the cutting edge of research in computer science.”
Beck, Derryl & Helen Haymon Professor in the LSU School of Music, and Sterling, Arnaud & Edwards Professor in the LSU Department of Computer Science, both hold joint appointments with the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT. They jointly developed the Center for Digital Innovation proposal to expand research initiatives both are leading to advance components of 21st century computational science technology.
Beck, CCT interim director, is the University’s lead on the Arts, Visualization, Advanced Technologies and Research, or AVATAR, Initiative. LSU approved the AVATAR Initiative in Spring 2008 to create a concentrated academic research program in digital media, including animation, video games, electronic music and digital art.
Faculty with the AVATAR Initiative spent the past two years developing a program that will allow students to obtain a minor in digital media through the LSU Colleges of Art & Design and Engineering, in which they will take courses in several departments, including computer science, electrical and computer engineering, music, art, English, and mass communication, to prepare them for careers in digital media. The University approved this academic program in Fall 2009, and students can formally declare the minor beginning this semester.

Sterling, a former NASA and Caltech scientist who invented the Beowulf cluster that is the building block of the world’s supercomputing systems, leads the Systems Science and Engineering Focus Area within CCT. He and his research team have spent the past several years working on the ParalleX project to investigate how parallel computing environments can run effectively on large-scale machines.

He is part of the National Science Foundation’s Exascale Point Design Study program, the NSF HPC Task Force, the DARPA Exascale Technology and Software Studies, and the International Exascale Software Project. He also is leading LSU’s collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories on the recently announced DARPA Ubiquitous High Performance Computing Program to prototype next-generation supercomputers.

Sterling’s research group is conducting research to determine the execution models, application programming interfaces, system software and hardware the scientific research community will need when supercomputers move from Petascale to Exascale and become capable of running a million trillion calculations per second.

“With the additional funding our proposal has received through federal appropriations, we’re able to advance the research initiatives already taking place on campus and catalyze efforts within the digital media group and the supercomputer architecture group to expand work in both areas and create new opportunities,” Beck said.

For more information on the AVATAR Initiative, please visit http://avatar.lsu.edu.

For more information on the ParalleX project, please visit http://px.cct.lsu.edu, and for more information on the Exascale research taking place with Professor Sterling’s group, please visit http://exascale.cct.lsu.edu.

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