2016-2017 has been a year of sustained growth for MICDE’s research portfolio. The number of faculty affiliated with the institute stands at 130, spanning 30 departments and eight schools and colleges. The Center for Scientific Software Infrastructure was established to bring together the U-M community engaged in developing open scientific software. It will focus on establishing best practices for developing, disseminating and documenting scientific software in the public domain. Led by Prof. Emanuel Gull (Physics), the Center aims to provide training and support for researchers that are ready to transform their research codes into well-engineered software. It offers grant support in the form of programmers, consultants, and administrative assistance. It includes a portal to share your code with the research community at large.
MICDE’s two established centers, the Center for Network and Storage-Enabled Collaborative Computational Science (CNSECCS) and the Center for Data-Driven Computational Physics (DaCoP), each held their first symposium, showcasing their first year of research activities. This included evidence of the growing reach of OSiRIS, the open framework for storage, computation and collaboration against big scientific data, and the first results from ConFlux, U-M’s groundbreaking computing cluster for data-driven computational physics. These results have been presented at several conferences, and are appearing in the leading computational journals.
Vorticity field at a late time in the evolution of an elliptic vortex patch computed by a Lagrangian particle method with remeshing and treecode-accelerated evaluation of the Biot-Savart integral. (source: Ling Xu)
MICDE also funded its first round of Catalyst Grants, that are supporting four innovative computational science research projects. Research funded by the Catalyst Grants is breaking new ground, while helping define the future of computational science. This research consists of:
- studies of the neuronal dynamics of learning and memory formation;
- new algorithms for the complex, nonlinear dynamics of power grids;
- novel integral equations methods using recent advances in numerical analysis;
- and probabilistic computational frameworks for rare but often catastrophic events.
The past academic year MICDE hosted 14 external speakers with backgrounds and research concentrations that span the breadth of computational science of today and the future. The series culminated in MICDE’s annual symposium: “The New Era of Data-Enabled Computational Science,” which featured talks by worldwide leaders in computational science, including U-M faculty. The symposium included a student poster competition with over 50 entries.
Dr. Ann Almgren from the Lawrence Livermore National Lab speaking about Next Generation AMR, part of the 2016-2017 MICDE Seminar Series
MICDE faculty are committed to growing the already strong U-M community of computational scientists. Over the past year, as before, we have organized a number of workshops to foster collaboration and put together interdisciplinary teams in response to funding calls from federal agencies and foundations. MICDE offers faculty teams institutional support and direct links to our excellent educational programs as well as cyberinfrastructure, all of which strengthen faculty proposals. With the backing of our parent unit, Advanced Research Computing (ARC), and its technical and consulting services (ARC-Technology Services, and Consulting for Statistics, Computing and Analytics Research), this effort has raised over $22M in external funding over the past 2 years. This includes support from federal agencies (NSF, NIH, and DOD), as well as from industry. We also work with the academic units at U-M to identify compelling new areas for recruiting the type of faculty members who will drive computational science in the future.