Taking the Hard Road: ENG Community Celebrates Program’s Rigor and Rewards at 59th Commencement
On May 14, students and faculty gathered in the Trustee's Ballroom for the first-ever Senior Class Luncheon, where Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen announced the ENG student and keynote Commencement speakers and the ENG faculty awards. (Photo by BU Photo Services)
Reflections on years of hard work, aspirations to better the world, and a vibrant community spirit predominated at the College of Engineering’s 59th annual Commencement. Held on May 20 at the Track & Tennis Center, the event celebrated the accomplishments of 39 master of engineering, 177 master of science and 289 bachelor of science candidates.
In his opening remarks, Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen congratulated graduating seniors for completing “unquestionably the most difficult undergraduate degree program at Boston University” and urged them to continue taking on hard challenges to positively transform society. Quoting Tom Hanks’ character in A League of Their Own, he said “’It’s supposed to be hard. The hard is what makes it great. If it wasn’t hard, anyone could do it,’” and then added, “Anyone can’t do it; you can.”
Lutchen invoked a moment of silence to remember three outstanding BU students, Austin Brashears (ME’13), Roch Jauberty (CAS’14) and Daniela Lekhno (SMG’13), who died a week earlier when a van they were traveling in overturned on its way to a popular New Zealand tourist destination.
“The university lost some spectacular individuals; the College of Engineering lost one of the most incredible students that this College has ever had,” said Lutchen. “He was totally devoted to enhancing the College of Engineering experience for all the other students and to a life of impacting society with his engineering background.”
In a talk centered on service to fellow students and the world at large, undergraduate student speaker Yasmin M. Atefi (ME) stressed how the College’s strong sense of community enabled her and her fellow graduates to meet the many academic and other challenges they faced over the past four years.
“You’ve gone through the hard work. You’re about to receive your engineering degree and that puts you in a unique position to make the world we live in a better place,” said Atefi, adding, “Remember, you will not change the world alone; rely on your support networks to pull you through, just as you did in your senior projects.”
Recounting the rigors and rewards of the College of Engineering program in between bites of vegetables and dip during a lively reception for students and their guests preceding the Commencement ceremony, graduating seniors frequently described their past four years and future plans in “we” language indicative of a strong identification with the Engineering Class of 2012 community.
“It’s really nice to see all the hard work we put in come to fruition,” said Benjamin Duong (CE), who, among other things, learned “how to work well with people, how to keep trying different angles to solve a problem when your first approach doesn’t work, and how to manage time” while at the College. Duong plans to return to BU this fall to pursue a Master of Engineering in Computer Engineering degree after a summer internship with VMware, a global leader in cloud computing.
“We all worked really hard for this,” said Lisa Cervia (BME), who intends to focus on cancer research this fall as a PhD student at Duke University. “It’s a very good feeling.”
Inspired by the College’s emphasis on the Societal Engineer, Cervia devoted countless hours to her studies, including a senior project that improved a low-cost, portable, battery-operated, optical device that could be used to rapidly and non-invasively diagnose cancer in developing countries.
The Commencement speaker, Dr. Norman Augustine, a leading architect of the space program and a former CEO of Lockheed Martin, explored how students could build on their undergraduate experience to impact society.
“The education each of you has received has prepared you not only to survive in this changing world but also to serve and to shape it,” said Augustine, who received an honorary doctorate at the BU Commencement earlier in the day. “Yet shaping the world will require more than simply the world-class education you’ve received.”
Toward that end, he advised graduates to maintain a good reputation, pursue work that motivates them, seize opportunities as they present themselves, focus on current responsibilities rather than obsess about getting ahead, engage in selfless pursuits and lifelong learning, set big goals and take calculated risks.
Before presenting a diploma to each graduate, Lutchen announced several student awards for academic excellence and service, including the first-ever Societal Impact Capstone Project Awards, which recognized three projects deemed likely to have the biggest impact on society. Caitlin M. Monahan and Dayana Rojas (BME) won first place for “Robust Dissolution System for the Detection of Counterfeit Drugs in Resource-Limited Settings;” Kholood Al Tabash, Donald N. Dougherty, Eric A. Hsiao, Kenneth Zhong and Gregory A. Zoeller (ECE) won second place for iMedix—Patient-Nurse Communciation System;” and Rachel N. Deraney, Kaitlin C. Gargiulo and Chelsea Saniel (BME) won third place for “System for Nucleic Acid Preparation for TB Diagnostics (SNAP-TB).”
Lutchen also announced the Department Awards for Teaching Excellence: Professor H. Steven Colburn (BME); Assistant Professor Douglas Densmore (ECE); and Lecturer Caleb Farny (ME). The Outstanding Professor of the Year Award was presented to Professor Mark Horenstein (ECE) and the Faculty Service Award went to Associate Professor Hua Wang (ME, MSE).
By Mark Dwortzan
ME Student Captures Science & Engineering Symposium’s Top Honor
Else Frohlich
Mechanical Engineering Department would like to congratulate graduate student Else Frohlich for winning the President’s Award, the top prize at Boston University’s annual Science and Engineering Research Symposium:
- President’s Award
- Student: Else Frohlich
- Advisors: Joseph Charest (Draper Laboratory) and Xin Zhang (Boston University)
- Title: The Use of Controlled Surface Topography and Flow-induced Shear Stress to Influence Renal Epithelial Cell Function
Boston University hosts its annual Science and Engineering Day event, which is held in the George Sherman Union and gives students from all science and engineering disciplines the opportunity to share their current research endeavors.
“Else has exhibited excellent performance in her research, due to her excellent intellectual ability, strong creativity in problem solving, ability to understand both large scale goals and scientific detail, and her absolutely outstanding work ethic,” said advisors Charest and Zhang.
Physiologically representative and well-controlled in vitro models of human tissue are required to safely, accurately, and rapidly develop therapies for disease. Current in vitro models do not possess appropriate levels of cell function, resulting in an inaccurate representation of in vivo physiology. Physiologically relevant mechanical parameters, such as sub-micron substrate topography and flow-induced shear stress (FSS), can control cell functions such as alignment, migration, differentiation and phenotypic expression of cells.
In this research, Else developed a microfluidic tissue modeling device (MTMD) to mimic a kidney tubule microenvironment through simultaneous and independent control of both topography and FSS. To further establish the MTMD, a model cell type from a human renal proximal tubule cell line (HK-2) was cultured in the device and specific cell responses of alignment and tight junction (TJ) formation were quantified. Ultimately, the combination of topography and FSS resulted in the creation of a more realistic in vitro model of kidney tissue, which can significantly contribute to biological studies, disease models, pharmaceutical testing and tissue engineering applications.
“Research can seem daunting at times, but accomplishments in the lab, attending conferences and publishing journal articles gives me a sense of ownership and pride that is hard to find in a classroom,” said Else.
ME Junior Austin Brashears Remembered
Austin Brashears (ME'13)
Austin Brashears (ME’13) was among three BU students whose lives were cut short on May 13 when a van they were traveling in overturned on its way to a popular New Zealand tourist destination. Roch Jauberty (CAS’14) and Daniela Lekhno (SMG’13) also died in the accident.
Brashears, according to the New Zealand Herald,celebrated his 21st birthday a few weeks earlier by bungee jumping from the Auckland Harbour Bridge. The Huntington Beach, California native was studying mechanical engineering and minoring in energy technologies and environmental engineering. He was president of the BU men’s water polo club during the fall semester, and loved the music of Jack Johnson, Jason Mraz and John Mayer.
In an email sent to College of Engineering faculty, staff and students, Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen described Brashears as a “sensational member” of the ENG community.
“He was a student advisor, a Dean’s Host and was involved in many other community-enhancing and leadership activities,” Lutchen wrote. “His grades were sensational. Several faculty have individually contacted me to volunteer that Austin was one of the brightest and most enjoyable students they have known…[We] lost someone who amplified the very experience and goals we all have at Boston University’s College of Engineering.”
Brashears was an enthusiastic and much loved Orientation leader during the summer of 2011, where he worked with Rachel DeRaney (ENG’12), Vee Faller (ENG’13) and Katie Matthews (SED’12).
“He was a very loving, caring person,” said DeRaney. “He just radiated happiness. He was extremely intelligent, top of his class. He was an amazing role model for his freshmen and transfer students.”
According to Faller, Brashears “was incredibly smart, handsome, playful and wildly popular. He went undefeated in Words with Friends, mesmerized the summer staff with his love card readings and was able to see the good in everyone. He was always there for us when we needed him most. People will remember him for his zest for life and ability to start a dance party anywhere. He was genuine and an amazing person and friend.”
Katie Matthews (SED’12) says Brashears was a “gentleman,” who was always willing to walk her back to her apartment after late night Orientation events.
“Austin was a very genuine person,” she said. “He always wanted to know how you were doing. He always wanted to know what he could do to help other people. During Orientation events, it was clear that the incoming freshmen and transfer students he was working with just loved him. I could see how much fun he and his students were having.”
By Amy Laskowski, BU Today
Congratulations Prof Farny and Prof Wang
Professor Caleb Farny
Professor Hua Wang
Department of Mechanical Engineering proudly congratulates Professor Caleb Farny and Professor Hua Wang. The seniors in the department selected Professor Farny as the 2012 Professor of the Year. This is only his second year with the department. Professor Wang was named the recipient of the 2012 College of Engineering Faculty Service Award by the College Executive committee. He is the Associate Division Head of the Division of Systems Engineering.
Biological Telephone: Research Yields New Insight on How Cells and Proteins Communicate
An acoustic pulse propagating along a 2D-interface is predicted to be the physical basis of protein communication and a crucial mechanism for enabling the cell or an organ to orchestrate its activities as an individual entity.
Assistant Professor Matthias Schneider (ME) has found evidence of a highly efficient means of communication between cells and proteins: they “talk” to each other. In other words, acoustic signals propagate from one cell or protein to another, thereby signaling their neighbors to take a specified action.
Schneider, two of his graduate students—Josef Griesbauer and Stefan Bössinger—and a former colleague from the University of Augsburg in Germany, Achim Wixforth, describe their research in the May 9 online edition of Physical Review Letters. Their study is highlighted as an “Editors’ Suggestion,” indicating its far-reaching, interdisciplinary impact.
“Our findings support the controversial idea that sound propagation is the basis of inter- and intra-cellular communication and the foundation of nerve pulse propagation,” Schneider maintained. “This may lead to a fundamentally new way of thinking about organs, including the brain, and to novel approaches in treating organ disease and the engineering of artificial organs.”
Scientists have long identified two mechanisms for inter- and intracellular communication—immediate contact, in which proteins on the membranes of two neighboring cells collide; and diffusion, in which a protein on one cell membrane dispatches particles through the cell that eventually impact another protein or cell.
Schneider’s efforts to uncover a third mechanism—acoustic waves—stems from the work of Albert Einstein and Konrad Kaufmann (a former mentor of Schneider’s) and the realization that the inner landscape of individual cells is crowded with a network of two-dimensional ridges, known as “interfaces,” that form a distinct, continuous pathway leading from one end of a cell to another or even connecting multiple cells. Over the past two years, Schneider and his collaborators have conducted experiments to show that 2D acoustic waves propagate along these interfaces, just as sound travels through air.
Their results suggest that proteins attached to neighboring cells can “communicate” across the continuous 2D interfaces via acoustic waves, potentially enabling biological activities that range from energy consumption to digestion.
The researchers created a prototypical interface by spreading soap-like lipid molecules from a cell membrane onto a water surface. Once the lipids formed a two-dimensional film, they added a solvent such as ethanol or chloroform to excite one end of the film and produce an acoustic wave, and used a pressure sensor to measure unmistakable changes in pressure at the other end of the film.
“We’ve shown that a sound wave can propagate through these interfaces from one end of the film to the other, compressing and expanding them along the way,” said Schneider. “Similarly, as acoustic waves propagate along a cell’s interfaces, a protein on one end of the cell may ‘feel’ the pressure and other changes ‘communicated’ from the other end.”
To confirm this phenomenon in living systems, Schneider plans to investigate sound wave propagation in algae, earthworm and, ultimately, human cells.
“The idea presented is a major step for one of the most fundamental questions in science, ‘Can physics explain life?’ explored most notably in physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s book, What is Life?” said Schneider. “It’s not that we can say ‘yes’ yet, but we can say, ‘There is no reason to believe it cannot, and we just demonstrated why we should go ahead on Schrödinger’s quest.’”
Spacefaring ME Freshman Wins College’s First Imagineering Competition
First prize winner David Harris (ME'15) delivering a PowerPoint presentation on his project, a low-cost sounding rocket.
Since its opening last October, the Singh Imagineering Lab has lived up to Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen’s vision of the facility as a place where College of Engineering students could cultivate their entrepreneurial spirit and develop as Societal Engineers who apply their expertise to advance our quality of life. On April 24 in the Ingalls Engineering Resource Center conference room, a number of undergraduates showcased their extracurricular efforts to do just that, as they vied for top prizes in the College’s first annual Imagineering Competition.
Facing a judging panel of four College faculty members and administrators across an oblong conference table, the competitors described, demonstrated and defended original projects that they developed in the Imagineering Lab and other on-campus facilities. The judges assessed each project for originality, ingenuity and creativity; quality of design and prototype; functionality; and potential to positively impact society.
Soaring Ambition
The winner of the $2,500 first prize was David Harris (ME’15), who designed, built and tested a prototype of a sounding rocket that could be used to take measurements and perform scientific experiments in suborbital flight. The 12-foot, 70-pound, two-stage rocket is intended to launch small payloads for $1,400—a pittance compared to NASA’s $1 million price tag for hitching a ride on a larger-scale sounding rocket, or the $200,000 required by the cheapest commercial alternative. To cut costs, Harris is developing the rocket largely from commercial, off-the-shelf components.
Second prize winner Konstantinos Oikonomopoulos (ME'14) presenting a prototype of his highly accurate, affordable, easy-to-assemble, desktop 3D printer.
“My vision is that we can have access to space for any project, any time, any budget,” the freshman declared, exuding the confidence of a seasoned CEO as he delivered his PowerPoint presentation. “If we can lower the cost of access and reduce the barriers, then anybody in any country can access the capabilities that space has to offer, such as medical research, security and defense applications and earth science missions.”
Harris, who is also the president of the BU Rocket Club, outlined his plans to fly the rocket this summer in his home state of Oregon to an altitude of 40,000 feet using GPS tracking, launch an upgraded version to 100,000 feet next summer in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, and enable the rocket to make it to space by the time he graduates.
“All members of the panel were very impressed by the project,” said Associate Dean for Administration Richard Lally, who judged the competition along with Associate Dean for Educational Initiatives and Professor Donald Wroblewski (ME), Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs and Professor Solomon Eisenberg (BME) andJonathan Rosen, director of the Technology Innovation Education Program. “Any one of the components for the rocket would have made a worthwhile project for the competition. The overall approach, design and components were all very professionally done.”
Upgrading Society
Garnering second prize and a $1,500 check was Konstantinos Oikonomopoulos (ME’14), who constructed a highly accurate, affordable, easy-to-assemble, desktop 3D printer that could serve as a cheap alternative to commercial models used for rapid prototyping of manufactured products. The third prize winners, Alex Kithes (EE’14) and Matthew Pollack (ME’14), received $1,000 for their project, a low-cost personal wind turbine that could be used to power small electronic devices and recharge cellphones and laptops, and reduce reliance on the electric power grid.
Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen (center) with Imagineering Competition winners Alex Kithes (EE'14) and Matthew Pollack (ME'14) (third prize); David Harris (ME'15) (first prize); and Konstantinos Oikonomopoulos (ME'14) (second prize)
Sponsored by John Maccarone (ENG’66), the competition was designed to reinforce the ideal of creating the Societal Engineer by spotlighting student efforts to design, build and test new technologies that promise to positively impact society. On that score, all three prizewinning projects hit the target.
The low-cost sounding rocket could vastly improve access to space for a wide range of experiments that could lead to improvements in the quality of life on earth; the personal wind turbine could reduce individuals’ consumption of fossil fuels, cutting atmospheric pollution and greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming; and the simple, affordable 3D printer could enable small labs and individuals on limited budgets to rapidly prototype manufactured products and boost local economies.
Imagineering Lab programming is supported by the Kern Family Foundation and alumni contributions to the ENG Annual Fund.
By Mark Dwotzan
Prof. Barba Named CUDA Fellow
Prof. Barba is among four new CUDA Fellows named by NVIDIA Corporation in advance of this year’s GPU Technology Conference. She joins an elite group of leaders in GPU computing.
- “Each of these individuals has demonstrated a passion and commitment to using CUDA and the power of GPU computing to help solve some of the worlds’ most challenging computational problems,” said Bill Dally, chief scientist at NVIDIA, in reference to the CUDA Fellows.
- “We look forward to working with them to continue spreading the word about the industry-changing impact GPU computing offers to developers, researchers and academics worldwide.”
The invitation-only CUDA Fellows program was established in 2008, with the inaugural nomination of Prof. P. J. Narayan of the Institute of Information Technology at Hyderabad, and Prof. Mike Giles of Oxford University.
- ‣See Prof. Giles on this press video receiving his award
Three CUDA Fellows were named in 2010, followed by the latest announcement which sums to nine individuals having been appointed so far. Of these, Prof. Barba is the first female appointee.
Prof. Barba is an early adopter of GPU technology for scientific computing, having been involved in this field since 2007. She was the first to advocate that GPUs are an important technology for scientifically developing countries, allowing them to access high-performance computing.
Owning and operating a cluster of GPUs is within reach at many institutions in middle-income countries, and Prof. Barba has personally driven the adoption of GPUs at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, which in 2011 became the first CUDA Teaching Center in Chile.
In January 2011, Barba led the NSF- and DOE-funded Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute “Scientific Computing in the Americas: the challenge of massive parallelism”, which was held in Chile. Almost seventy graduate students and postdocs from the US and Latin America participated, receiving instruction on parallel computing and GPUs from world-leaders, including Prof. Takayuki Aoki (TokyoTech) who has also been named 2012 CUDA Fellow.
She also serves as Papers Co-Chair of the inaugural Innovative Parallel Computing conference, InPar’12, to be held in conjunction with the GPU Technology Conference.
Prof. Barba is co-principal investigator of the NSF grant that brought to BU the first GPU cluster, currently being used by her group and by other researchers across campus. She has also recently received the prestigious NSF CAREER award for her research in scalable algorithms on heterogeneous systems using GPUs.
About the CUDA Fellows Program
- The CUDA Fellows Program recognizes individuals who are committed to leading the use and adoption of the CUDA architecture and GPU computing. CUDA Fellows have demonstrated the benefits of GPU computing to advance their fields of research, and have been instrumental in introducing GPU computing to their peers. Each CUDA Fellow receives a number of benefits, including the latest NVIDIA GPUs, a travel stipend, access to NVIDIA technical staff, and priority in receiving early releases of NVIDIA GPU hardware and software. CUDA Fellows receive continued support for their leading GPU computing research, and are invited to share their expertise at universities and technical conferences around the world.
Announcement
http://blogs.nvidia.com/2012/04/nvidia-names-four-new-cuda-fellows/
Other links
“Flipped Classroom” Energizes Computational Fluid Dynamics Course
While roaming the ENG ME 702 classroom, Asst. Prof. Lorena Barba (ME) provides one-on-one attention to students paired off at workstations, occasionally peppering them with leading questions such as "Is that your best plot of the pressure?"
“Two . . . one . . . zero. Change!”
Clutching an iPhone, Assistant Professor Lorena Barba (ME) works a brightly lit computer lab at the Photonics Center like a Hollywood movie director, cueing her ENG ME 702 – Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) students to take their places on the set of what she calls the “Navier-Stokes Speed Dating Game.” As the action unfolds, five of the 10 graduate students and seniors in attendance—selected at random by an app on Barba’s iPhone—remain at their workstations and display their software solutions to a physics problem using the classic equations that describe fluid motion. The other five pair off with a succession of three-minute “dates” at each workstation, compare notes, and select the date with the most impressive solution. The winning programmer then projects his code and graphical results on a whiteboard at the front of the room, sparking a lively discussion about its merits.
The scene departs dramatically from what took place in last spring’s version of the course, when Barba delivered a lecture on the same topic, deriving equations on the whiteboard as students mainly listened and took notes. That’s because this year she decided to “flip the class,” posting videos of lectures online for home study and using class time to guide highly interactive, collaborative problem-solving sessions that clarify concepts presented in the lecture—i.e., the “homework.” Rather than deliver information from on high, she meanders through the
Barba guides a discussion in which ME master's student Yunshen Cai (left) questions ME PhD student Andrew Wixom (far right) on his interpretation of 3D graphs displayed on a nearby whiteboard. Most of the class eventually joins in.
room, offering an occasional leading question to help a student get unstuck, or facilitating a conversation about the relative advantages of different approaches to the problem at hand.
From Lecture to Workshop
“Creating an active and engaged learning environment is automatic when flipping a class, and with today’s technology for creating multimedia learning materials, it can be done without losing any of the content,” maintains Barba, who made the switch by editing 40 hours of lecture videos that she had already recorded and posted on iTunes U for students in previous incarnations of the CFD course. “In fact, it is the perfect use of technology for education.”
It takes more than technology, however, to implement a flipped classroom successfully, she observes.
“The challenge of the flipped model, I have found, is designing the class activities by which the students are led to discover the important concepts, and explain them to each other. During these activities, the instructor can walk among the students giving them personalized attention, sometimes giving a tip or asking a question.”
While the flipped classroom strategy has been around for more than five years, the widespread availability of online video technology has recently accelerated its adoption in schools and colleges across the globe. Also driving its use is a growing body of empirical studies that underscore the ineffectiveness of the traditional lecture. Informed by these studies, a recent President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology report concluded that flipping the classroom, active learning and other more dynamic teaching methods are essential to producing sufficient numbers of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates to maintain U.S. preeminence in STEM fields.
Upgrading the Learning Experience
For Barba’s students, the flipped classroom has not only captivated their attention, but also deepened their command of the subject matter.
“Class meetings are active, engaging, and encourage cooperative learning,” said Brad Garner, a LEAP student pursuing an MEng degree in mechanical engineering. “Watching condensed versions of traditional lectures at home allows me to reinforce the concepts demonstrated in class without sacrificing the ability to ask questions of Professor Barba or my classmates.”
“The biggest upside to the ‘flipped classroom’ concept is that it provides a structured platform for peer-to-peer learning; every class is like a study group,” added Andrew Wixom, a first-year PhD student in mechanical engineering. “In our class, everyone helps out and the coding projects feel almost like a collaborative effort.”
Barba credits the approach for improving student performance.
“Last time, students usually had a bug or more in their code during their final presentations and never fixed them afterwards,” she recalls. “This time, nearly all are discovering and correcting their errors way before their presentations. Nearly everyone’s code works, leading to much more relaxed, creative presentations.”
A Rising Tide of Innovative Education at ENG
The flipped CFD course is one of a growing number of College of Engineering courses in which innovative educators are transforming the classroom into a center for active learning. Also underway are more formal initiatives, such as the University-wide Redesigning the Undergraduate Learning Experience (RULE) program, that are replacing the traditional lecture hall in courses such as EK301: Engineering Mechanics I with a learning studio where students collaborate at round tables to solve problems under the guidance of faculty and graduate teaching fellows.
“One of the greatest benefit of ‘flipping’ and other active learning approaches is the rapid feedback that students receive at a time when the ideas are still fresh in their mind,” noted Professor Donald Wroblewski (ME), Associate Dean for Educational Initiatives, who began flipping the aerospace senior design course in 2009. “Students leave class with a level of clarity and a sense of accomplishment that are hard to achieve in traditional lecture formats.”
After one round of the “Navier-Stokes Speed Dating Game,” the most popular date describes the underlying physics behind his solution on the communal whiteboard. Soon another student joins him at the board, challenging his interpretation, and in no time more than half the class weighs in from their workstations. The room is abuzz with the kind of spontaneous intellectual exchange that would appear out of place during a traditional lecture. Though Barba guides the discussion, the class practically runs itself, decisively turning the old paradigm on its head.
More information about the flipped CFD classroom is available here.
By Mark Dwortzan
Professor Lorena A. Barba Wins NSF CAREER Award
Professor Lorena Barba
Professor Lorena Barba has been awarded the prestigious CAREER award of the National Science Foundation for her research and educational endeavors in scientific computing and applications in fluid mechanics and computational biology.
The award will fund Prof. Barba’s research in scalable algorithms for extreme computing on heterogeneous systems. Recent trends in high-performance computing (HPC) are clearly in the direction of computing systems involving various structurally different types of hardware (i.e., heterogeneous), of which a prominent example are GPUs (graphics processing units). Prof. Barba is one of the early adopters of GPU hardware for scientific computing, and was recognized by an NVIDIA Academic Partnership Award in August 2011 for her research in this booming field.
“Receiving the CAREER award will give my research program considerable momentum, at a time when computational science is rising in the national agenda,” Barba said.
“The field is challenged to reach the milestone of ‘exascale computing’ in a few years, that is, computing a thousand times more powerful than today’s. With rapid changes in computer hardware, the algorithms and software used in science need to be re-invented, they need to be parallel like never before.”
High-performance computing can help scientists solve the most enduring problems: understanding climate, predicting natural disasters, simulating the proteins that are the building blocks of life. But first, algorithms will have to be adapted to work in massively parallel hardware and scientists will need to learn to compute at extreme scales. Prof. Barba’s research group now has the support of NSF to serve this priority national goal.
Among the matters of highest priority are development of scalable algorithms that can exploit the enormous parallelism of new systems, and educating the next generation of computational scientists.
Prof. Barba is developing algorithms that offer ideal scaling with problem size, growing linearly with the number of unknowns in a problem, and that map with excellent performance to many-core hardware such as GPUs. Barba’s target applications are computational fluid dynamics and computational biology, such as the simulation of proteins interacting through electrostatics.
The goal of Barba’s educational program, on the other hand, is preparing students for interdisciplinary research in computational science. She builds on a long track record of success both in the use of technology to support learning, and in catalyzing international collaboration and outreach. She is aiming to enhance educational environments using technology, including new media, for both curricular instruction and to increase the nation’s science literacy (via open educational resources). Her goal of fostering the next generation of computational scientists will be pursued via advanced studies institutes and extra-mural workshops that aim to bridge the gap of educational offerings in computational science, hampered today by the discipline-based structures within academia.
Prof. Barba is already recognized as a leader in these activities. She previously organized and obtained funding from NSF and DOE for the Pan-American Advanced Studies Institute “Scientific Computing in the Americas: the Challenge of Massive Parallelism.” She has also been contributing open educational resources (OER) in the last few years, with several of her courses showcased on iTunes U.
The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of the early-career development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education.
Award announcement
http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1149784
Egg Drop Contest Kicked Off E-Week 2012
Pi Tau Sigma organized an Egg Drop Event for National Engineers Week at the College of Engineering. Here PTS President Tom Waldman (ME'12) launches his entry.
A Cheerios box. A Swiss Miss canister with balls of newspaper inside. A soda bottle stuffed with packing peanuts.
These were among the entries for this year’s Egg Drop Contest, the first of 19 events celebrating National Engineers Week on campus this year. The Egg Drop drew more than a dozen College of Engineering undergraduates to a window on the fourth floor of 110 Cummington Street and to the sidewalk below. Provided with one egg per entry, the students took turns dropping their protective containers and fragile payloads from the window and waiting as ground-based judges inspected the eggs for damage. Unharmed eggs were retested to see if they could survive three or more falls.
Founded in the U.S. in 1951 by the National Society of Professional Engineers, E-Week aims to encourage interaction and communication among engineering students, faculty, alumni and industry.
Drawing on volunteers from 22 undergraduate student organizations between Feb. 21 and March 2, this year’s College of Engineering E-Week includes hands-on competitions in which participants will build carbon nanotubes, K’Nex roller coasters and other structures that illustrate engineering concepts; engineering trivia contests; educational talks and films; social and recreational events from dinners to a faculty-student basketball game; professional networking and resume review sessions; and the annualOrder of the Engineer ceremony.
“E-week is all about promoting engineering and interactions among engineering students,” said Tom Waldman, president of Pi Tau Sigma (PTS), the mechanical engineering honor society, which sponsored the Egg Drop. “So in the spirit of E-week we encouraged students to work together and compete to design unique and efficient containers, and have some fun with engineering.”
When the Egg Drop Contest concluded, Waldman and PTS member Amy Ashur (ME’12) named and offered gift cards to the event’s three winners: Aditi Basu (ME ’12), whose Wheat Thins box with a helicopter blade attached to the top won for best engineering design; Dave Berry (BME ’12), whose ball of rubber bike tubing connected to a plastic bag parachute won for most creative design; and Gabe Venegas (ME ’12), whose tissue box won for lightest design.
A full schedule of E-Week 2012 events can be found here.
By Mark Dworzan