INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH

Illinois Computing Laboratory for Aerospace Systems and Software (ICLASS)

R. K. Iyer,Principal Investigator J. W.-S. Liu,Principal Investigator G. G. Belford, R. H. Campbell, A. A. Chien, M. Harandi, C. C. Hayes, W. M. Hwu, S. N. Kamin, J. H. Patel, J. Ponce, D. A. Reed, W. H. Sanders, J. Torrellas, B. Vaduvur, B. Wah, S. Basu, M. Beckman, J. Caplan, A. Dave, J. Dolby, W. Faheem, Y. Genc, Y. Huang, D. Hull, H. Jiau, A. Kuratti, M. Medina, M. Ortega-Binderberger, S. Pakin, L. Qiao, K. Safford, Y. Shang, M. Storch, E. Su, M. Trommer, S. Yao
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NAG 1-613
(Also conducted in the Coordinated Science Laboratory)

The Illinois Computing Laboratory for Aerospace Systems and Software (ICLASS) is a NASA center for excellence in aerospace computing. Its research focus is in the areas of parallel architectures and algorithms, reliable and fault-tolerant computing, distributed and real-time systems, and software engineering and artificial intelligence. Problems being addressed include system-level functional test generation, measurement and simulation of parallel I/O environments, advanced compilation technology for high-performance digital signal processing systems, compilation of programs for distributed memory message-passing multicomputers, automated learning and generalization of heuristics, development and analysis of parallel simulation algorithms, a design environment for fault-tolerant systems, dependability of validation-performance systems, reliable streams in ad hoc networks, high-performance memory systems for advanced multiprocessors, predictable high-speed communication for workstation clusters, performance analysis, virtual reality, and parallel I/O, systems support for high-performance parallel applications, system service platform for distributed multimedia applications, multimedia data management, open and composable real-time systems, 3-D vision systems, and support environments for process and artifact design.

Advanced Computational Approaches to Biomolecular Modeling and Structure Determination

K. SchultenPrincipal Investigator (Physics), L. Kale,Principal Investigator R. Skeel,Principal Investigator G. Budescu, I. Hofacker, H. Lu
National Science Foundation/Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, BIR-9318159
(A multi-institution collaborative project)

Clusters of high-performance workstations make possible meaningful simulations of biomolecular structures of as many as 100,000 atoms. To achieve this goal, an interdisciplinary team of researchers has developed a scalable parallel object-oriented molecular dynamics program, NAMD. Through the construction and efficient implementation of advanced algorithms, the aim is to make NAMD as effective as possible for large-scale computations.

Resource for Concurrent Biological Computing

K. SchultenPrincipal Investigator (Physics), R. Skeel,Principal Investigator L. Kale,Principal Investigator G. Budescu, A. Dalke, A. Shinozaki, T. Ritz, J. Ulrich
National Institutes of Health, P41RR05969

The role of the resource is to develop computational tools and engage in collaborative research for the benefit of biomedical community. To this end, a computational environment for structural biology MDScope has been developed that includes an interactive visualization program VMD, a scalable parallel molecular simulation program NAMD, and a communications program MDComm from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which permits VMD to run on a high-end graphics workstation with NAMD running on a cluster of high-performance workstations.