News

The University of Minnesota's latest solar car took second in the biennial American Solar Challenge race. This year's race went from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Chicago, Illinois on June 19-26, 2010. The vehicle, named Centaurus II, was designed and built by University of Minnesota students. Team members used MSI supercomputers for modeling airflow around the shell of the vehicle. An article about the Solar Vehicle Project's work appeared in the Summer 2009 Research Bulletin.

Research Exhibition prize winners and pictures are now linked from the MSI 25th Anniversary Research Exhibition page.

Blue Waters, which is expected to be the world’s most powerful supercomputer for open scientific research when it goes online in 2011, is already providing researchers with opportunities for state-of-the-art computing research. Professor and MSI Fellow Paul Woodward (Astronomy) is one of the astrophysicists using Blue Waters. See a brief discussion on HPCWire.

A BICB trainee at the University of Minnesota Rochester has won a prestigious IBM Ph.D. Fellowship for work he has done with Blue Gene and MSI on metabolic pathways. MSI provides computational resources to the BICB (Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology) program and is a partner with the program in a Shared University Research (SUR) Program grant from IBM.

The NSF is soliciting proposals for computing time on the Blue Waters petascale computing system now under construction at the University of Illinois. The National Institute of General Medical Sciences at NIH is hosting a virtual workshop and applicant briefing on Blue Waters to encourage the development of high-impact community proposals for computing time on this new resource.

Contacts: Amy Danielson, Office of the Vice President for Research, (612) 625-1453, dani0139@umn.edu Patty Mattern, University News Service, (612) 624-2801, mattern@umn.edu MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (11/17/2009) —

MSI researchers are on a team that was recently awarded a $2.2 million grant from the Department of Energy for a project investigating using bacteria to produce biofuel. The lead investigator, Professor Larry Wackett (BMBB), is an MSI Associate Fellow and Principal Investigator. Other researchers on this project with MSI ties are Regents Professor Lanny Schmidt (MSI Associate Fellow) and Assistant Professor Aditya Bahn (MSI Principal Investigator), both of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science.

On September 26, MSI participated in the Math and Science Family Fun Fair at Coffman Memorial Union. This annual event, organized by the Institute of Technology’s Office of Diversity and Outreach, allows children to participate in fun, hands-on activities designed to teach them about math, science, and engineering. Visitors to the MSI booth could view 3-D computer graphics of molecules and could touch and examine the working parts of a computer.   Daniel Sosa explains the role of hemoglobin in the blood.

Five MSI researchers are among the new McKnight Land-Grant Professors for 2009-11 recently announced by the University. They are Arindam Banerjee (Department of Computer Science and Engineering), RyanElliott (Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics), Tian He (Department of Computer Science and Engineering), Julian Marshall (Department of Civil Engineering), and Martin Saar (Department of Geology and Geophysics). The awards are intended to advance the careers of outstanding junior faculty and include a research grant, summer support, and a research leave in the second year.