A key tenant of CITR's strategy for building a flourishing and sustainable ITR community at UT has been its investment in thriving research efforts. As a result and in order to keep UTK on the leading edge of high performance scientific computing, CITR directly supports the work of the Innovative Computing Lab (ICL), which serves as the foundation of CITR's research initiatives. In addition, CITR's leadership has resulted in a strong record of local research collaborations, e.g., UTK/ORNL, DOE SciDAC projects, and the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS). New research collaborations include the NSF-funded $16M National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) and the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), part of NSF’s $65M Track 2B award. NCCS is home to the world’s overall most powerful supercomputer, called Jaguar, and UTK’s NICS is home to the world’s most powerful academic supercomputer, called Kraken. Together, these resources help facilitate CITR’s leadership in computational and IT research. CITR also recently contributed to two large ($3M) NSF educational program awards - Sustainable Technology through Advanced Interdisciplinary Research (STAIR) and Scalable Computing and Leading Edge Innovative Technologies (SCALE-IT). CITR director Dr. Dongarra is a co-PI on the NICS award and the SCALE-IT effort.
Experience shows that once an academic research program grows beyond a certain level of funding and activity, sustaining that success and spurring further growth requires a) additional research leaders to help broaden and diversify the lines of inquiry, b) organizational investment to help manage the collateral activities (e.g., project and proposal development, grant and contract management) that are inevitable concomitants of such high levels of success, and c) continual engagement with students at the graduate level to develop and sustain the next generation of research talent . CITR's investment in ITR has been expressly designed to address these general facts of research life in higher education. Currently, CITR's efforts focus on the Innovative Computing Laboratory as well as the coordination of the IGMCS.
Innovative Computing Laboratory http://icl.cs.utk.edu/Led by Dr. Jack Dongarra, the Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL) has been at the forefront of research in high performance and distributed computing for nearly two decades. The progress of scientific inquiry now depends on advances in scientific computing, where ICL continues to pioneer.
For more information about ICL, visit the website or download a copy of the 2009/2010 ICL Report.
The Logistical Computing and Internetworking Laboratory (LoCI), directed by Dr. Micah Beck, is devoted to leading edge research in Information Logistics, a new branch of Distributed Computing that studies the flexible co-scheduling of the fundamental physical resources that underpin all computer systems.
Institute of Environmental Modeling http://www.tiem.utk.edu/The Institute of Environmental Modeling (TIEM), under the leadership of Dr. Louis J. Gross, performs basic research in significant environmental problems with important regional, national, and international impact.