EECS Faculty Receive $500,000 from the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program to Create a High Performance Computing and Visualization Infrastructure at KU

The DURIP funding from the Army Research Office (ARO) will enable KU to acquire an HPC cluster and Mini CAVE to support research projects involving simultaneous parallel computing and parallel visualization. Suzanne Shontz, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, led the effort to coordinate KU researchers and define the infrastructure. The infrastructure will facilitate investigations in a wide variety of areas, including parallel mesh simplification algorithms for satellite videos, hybrid RANS/LES simulations of fighter configurations at high angle of attack with realistic Reynolds numbers, long-range acoustic propagation simulations, numerical modeling of nonlinear nanophotonic devices, large-scale computing and 4D data visualization in computational fluid dynamics, parallel algorithms for scientific visualization, parallel adaptive and moving mesh simulations, optimization of nanoporous materials for gas separation, and molecular simulation studies of electric double-layer capacitors. Alessandro Salandrino, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, will use the facility to design nonlinear nanophotonic devices. Salandrino will complement the traditional photonic design with full-wave simulations of charge density’s dynamics. James Miller, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, will develop new GPU and multicore parallel algorithms for processing in real time rapidly changing vector field data, producing real-time displays of these dynamically changing vector fields in the Mini CAVE.  Miller will also develop such algorithms targeting large Lidar data sets in GIS-related visualization applications in the Mini CAVE. Shontz will use the HPC infrastructure to develop parallel mesh simplification algorithms for satellite videos and parallel adaptive and moving mesh algorithms. The HPC and Mini CAVE infrastructure will also be used in EECS courses in parallel scientific computing, computer graphics, and scientific visualization. 

A dielectric waveguide loaded with an array of plasmonic inclusions employed in Professor Salandrino’s research.