MICDE awards seven Catalyst Grants

By | General Interest, Happenings, News, Research

The Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering has awarded its second round of Catalyst Grants, providing between $80,000 and $90,000 each to seven innovative projects in computational science. The proposals were judged on novelty, likelihood of success at catalyzing larger programs and potential to leverage ARC’s computing resources.

The funded projects are:

Title: Exploring Quantum Embedding Methods for Quantum Computing
Researchers: Emanuel Gull, Physics; Dominika Zgid, Chemistry.
Description: The research team will design quantum embedding algorithms that can be early adopters of quantum computers on development of advanced materials for possible applications in modern batteries, next-generation oxide electronics, or high-temperature superconducting power cables.

Title: Teaching autonomous soft machines to swim
Researchers: Silas Alben, Mathematics; Robert Deegan, Physics; Alex Gorodetsky, Aerospace Engineering
Description: Self-oscillating gels are polymeric materials that change shape, driven by chemical reactions occurring entirely within the gel. The research team will develop a computational and machine learning program to discover how to configure self-oscillating gels so that they undergo deformations that result in swimming. The long term goal is to develop a general framework for controlling autonomous soft machines.

Title: Urban Flood Modeling at “Human Action” Scale: Harnessing the Power of Reduced-Order Approaches and Uncertainty Quantification
Researchers: Valeriy Ivanov, Civil and Environmental Engineering; Nikolaos Katopodes, Civil and Environmental Engineering; Darren McKague Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering; Khachik Sargsyan, Sandia National Labs.
Description: The research team will demonstrate urban flood monitoring and prediction capabilities using NASA Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) data and relying on state-of-the-science uncertainty quantification tools in a proof-of-concept urban flooding problem of high complexity.

Title: Advancing the Computational Frontiers of Solution-Adaptive, Scale-Aware Climate Models
Researchers: Christiane Jablonowski, Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering; Hans Johansen, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
Description: Researchers will further develop a 3-D mesh adaptation model for climate modeling, allowing computational resources to be focused on phenomena of interest such as tropical cyclones or other extreme weather events. The project will also introduce data-driven machine learning paradigms into modeling of clouds and precipitation.

Title: Deciphering the meaning of human brain rhythms using novel algorithms and massive, rare datasets
Researchers: Omar Ahmed, Psychology, Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering
Description: The team will develop a set of algorithms for use on high performance computers to analyze de-identified brain data from patients in order to better understand what electrical oscillations tell us about rapidly changing behavioral and pathological brain states.

Title: Embedded Machine Learning Systems To Sense and Understand Pollinator Behavior
Researchers: Robert Dick, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Fernanda Valdovinos Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Center for Complex Systems; Paul Glaum, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
Description: To understand the mechanisms driving the population dynamics of pollinators, the research team will develop technologies for deeply embedded hardware/software learning systems capable of remote, long term, autonomous operation; and will analyze the resulting new data to better understand pollinator activity.

Title: Deep Learning for Phylogenetic Inference
Researchers: Jianzhi Zhang, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Yuanfang Guan, Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics.
Description: The research team will use deep neural networks to infer molecular phylogenies and extract phylogenetically useful patterns from amino acid or nucleotide sequences, which will help understand evolutionary mechanisms and build evolutionary models for a variety of analyses.

For more on the Catalyst Grants, see http://micde.umich.edu/catalyst/.

CASC image competition open for submissions

By | General Interest, Happenings, News

The image competition for the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) 2019 annual brochure is now open. Winning images will be featured in the brochure, which is distributed to industry, government and academia. An image from U-M Aerospace Engineering Professor Joaquim Martins was on the cover of the 2016 edition, and several U-M investigators have had their work featured in the brochure in other years.

Images will be judged on the following criteria:

  • Illustrative of research underway at the center submitting the proposed images
  • Focus on research that offers a broad representation of what CASC members have undertaken
  • Timeliness of visualization relative to events currently in the news
  • Exhibits intellectual merit
  • Provides scientific, cultural, economic impact
  • Compelling, visually interesting, lively, colorful images in a  high-resolution format

Please send potential submissions to Dan Meisler, ARC Communications Manager, at dmeisler@umich.edu. The deadline is June 11, 2018.

[SC2 Jobs] Scientist for the development of VASP

By | SC2 jobs

Job Description

The Vienna ab-initio Simulation Package (VASP) group seeks one scientist for the development of the software package VASP . VASP is a de facto standard for the simulation of condensed matter systems using the Schroedinger equation. A very exciting and lively working environment with many collaborative research projects involving theory as well as experimental groups is offered. The work will cover VASP software maintenance and support, optimization of the existing codes for latest high performance computer architectures (e.g. Intel Xeon, Nvidia GPU), cutting edge theory developments as enumerated below, as well as co-development of workflow tools (ASE, AiiDA, pymatgen, etc.)

Requirements

  • PhD in physics or chemistry
  • Excellent record in any area of computational solid state physics or chemistry. The areas of expertise can include – but are not restricted to – density functional theory, many-body Green’s function techniques, quantum field theoretical methods, quantum chemistry methods, or modeling of condensed matter systems.
  • Candidates with proven expertise in developing new computational methods and adapting them to high performance computers will be given preference.
  • Prior knowledge of VASP is advantageously but not strictly required.

Location

Vienna, Austria

To apply:

i) CV including full academic record,
ii) list of publications and talks including two reprints representative of previous research,
iii) expression of interest concerning research area(s) and previous expertise (one page).

Applications need to be sent to georg.kresse_at_univie.ac.at (topic: Scientific software developer).

Selection of candidates will start immediately and continue until the  positions are filled. The contract will be for one year initially, with the  possibility for a permanent contract after positive evaluation.

 

Sincerely,
The VASP team