News

MSI PI Rafael Fernandes (Physics and Astronomy) has been named a McKnight Presidential Fellow for 2017-19. This program recognizes exceptional faculty who have been newly granted tenure and promotion to associate professor. A complete list of this year’s recipients can be found on the U’s Scholars Walk website. Professor Fernandes uses MSI resources for quantum Monte Carlo studies of high-temperature superconductors.

MSI’s shared scratch storage volume has been heavily utilized during the months of June and July, so much so that on one occasion all jobs writing to scratch failed because scratch reached its capacity. Since this incident, we have been working one-on-one with users to prevent future failures by moving some data off of scratch to other MSI storage resources better suited for longer-term data storage. While one-on-one engagements have helped, starting August 1 we plan to implement a couple new measures to safeguard against scratch filling and causing jobs writing to scratch to crash.

The Duluth News Tribune recently featured two MSI PIs, Professor Jay Austin (UMD – Head, Department of Physics and Astronomy; Large Lakes Observatory) and Assistant Professor Sam Kelly (UMD – Physics and Astronomy; Large Lakes Observ

Five MSI PIs have received awards from the 2017 Research Infrastructure Investment Program. This Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) program is designed to support transdisciplinary research and collaboration across the U. Thirteen projects received awards this year. Below are the MSI PIs who have received awards: James Dutton

Professor Lian Shen, an MSI PI from the Department of Mechanical Engineering (College of Science and Engineering), has been named the new Director of the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory (SAFL). Professor Shen has been a member of SAFL since his arrival at the University of Minnesota in 2012. He will assume the directorship on September 1, 2017.

MSI PI R. Roger Ruan and a PhD student in his group, Erik Anderson, have developed a process that converts scum, a byproduct of wastewater treatment, into biodiesel. A story about the process appears on the University of Minnesota News site: U of M wastewater treatment pilot promises to turn scum into profit.

MSI PI Bethanie Stadler (professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering) is the Principal Investigator for a project that has received a 2017 Minnesota Futures Grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research.

On Wednesday, June 7, 2017, MSI staff will perform scheduled maintenance and upgrades to various MSI systems. During this month's scheduled maintenance period, Primary Storage, Mesabi, and Itasca will be unavailable throughout much of the day. June maintenance will include:

MSI PI David Odde, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and member of the Masonic Cancer Center, is featured in the spring issue of the University of Minnesota Foundation’s Legacy magazine. The story describes Professor Odde’s computational modeling of cancer-cell metastasis.