News

Fighting Invasive Species
Several MSI PIs are the leads on projects that recently received funding from the Minnesota Invasive Terrestrial Plants and Pests Center (MITPPC). The projects aim at preventing and fighting various weeds, diseases, and insects that are affecting Minnesota’s plant life. The MSI PIs and their projects are:
MSI PIs Named to Academies for Excellence
Two MSI PIs have been named to the Academies for Excellence, which recognizes outstanding University of Minnesota faculty in the areas of scientific research, educational scholarship, clinical practice, and team science: Academy for Excellence in Health Research Jerrold Vitek (professor and chair, Neurology)
Mesabi Interactive Queue Replacing LabQi Cluster
MSI has created and released a Mesabi Interactive Queue. The purpose of the Mesabi Interactive Queue is to increase the availability of nodes for interactive use and to replace the interactive resources available in the LabQi Cluster. The Mesabi Interactive Queue can be used in real-time for tasks such as interactive data exploration, creating plots or images, visualizations, or testing sections of code that will be used on other MSI queues.  Here are several examples of how you can request an interactive HPC job on the new Mesabi Interactive Queue:
MSI Researcher Debmayla Ray Talks Computational Chemistry
Debmayla Ray, a computational chemist and PhD candidate in the group of MSI PI Laura Gagliardi (professor, Chemistry), is featured in Student Voices on YouTube. He talks about his research, computational chemistry at the U, and the importance mental health.
Fighting Chronic Wasting Disease
MSI PI Peter Larsen (assistant professor, Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences) is featured in a recent news story by WCCO-TV about chronic wasting disease (CWD) in Minnesota’s deer population. CWD is a deadly prion disease. Professor Larsen’s lab is working to develop an instant CWD field test, which would allow hunters to know immediately whether their deer is safe to eat.
Self-Fitting Textiles
MSI PI Julianna Abel (assistant professor, Mechanical Engineering) and colleagues have published research that describes their development of a self-fitting, temperature-responsive textile. The study was published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies. It describes a fabric made of shape memory alloys that, using only body heat, can self-adjust to mold to the body.
Healthy Diet, Healthy Environment
MSI PI Jason Hill (associate professor, Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering) and colleagues have published a paper that discusses several different foods and their impact both on human health and on the environment. The research examines the impact of one additional serving a day of these foods on five different health conditions and five types of environmental harm. In general, the study found that healthy foods also tend to be less detrimental to the environment.
November 2019 Maintenance
On Wednesday, November 6, 2019, MSI staff will perform scheduled maintenance and upgrade to various MSI systems. Primary Storage, Mesabi, and Itasca will be unavailable throughout much of the day. A global system reservation will start at 5:00 a.m. on November 6. Jobs that cannot be completed before 5:00 a.m. on November 6 will be held until after maintenance and then started once the system returns to production status. November maintenance will include:
MSI PI Traian Dumitrica and Students Win 2020 Cundall Award
MSI PI Traian Dumitrica (Professor, Mechanical Engineering) and his students Yuezho Wang, Hao Xu, Grigorii Drozdov, and Igor Ostanin have been selected as winners of the 2020 Peter A. Cundall Award for the Fifth International Itasca Symposium. The extended abstract for which they received the award is titled, “Distinct Element Method (DEM) for fibrous composites: Toward computational guided manufacturing.”

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