Russ Miller
UB Distinguished Professor

Dept of Computer Science & Engineering
State University of New York at Buffalo

2000 Media Coverage

• Dr. Russ Miller was Director of CCR during this period.

• December 22: Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute and University at Buffalo Researchers to use CCR's supercomputers for Structural Genomics Research.
• December 21: In the Neighborhoods section of the Buffalo News in an article on SUNY's proposed budget, UB President Greiner remarks that the proposed budget increase will make it possible to continue "the technology initiatives that have helped us to attain national prominence in supercomputing and computational science."
• December 18: A team of SGI engineers and CCR staff installs the final set of processors in the 150 Processor SGI Pentium III 1-GHz system. This machine represents the most powerful machine available in CCR, clocking in at 150GFlops peak performance, effectively doubling the compute capacity available in CCR.
• December 7: The Reporter publishes an article "CCR to test next-generation chip". This article focuses on the SGI-CCR partnership to evaluate clusters of Intel's new 64-bit Itanium (previously Merced) chip. The article states that CCR is one of just three sites in the world selected by SGI to beta-test Intel's next-generation chip, the new Itanium processor. Dr. Russ Miller states that "This is the next wave of supercomputing. The Itanium, Intel's next-generation chip, represents not just a dramatically more powerful chip eventually capable of performing computations almost an order of magnitude faster than the current Pentium III." The Itanium is expected ultimately to displace the current Pentium processor in a wide range of computing applications. The choice of UB as one of only three beta-sites worldwide reflects the breadth and depth of CCR's research focus, particularly in modern structural biology, said Miller. The article states that it also reflects the center's extensive experience with cluster computing. A key test for the new Itanium technology at CCR will be how it performs with SnB, the protein-structure software of choice used by more than 500 drug-design-and-research labs that was developed by Dr. Russ Miller and scientists at the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute.
• December 4: The Spectrum publishes a significant article on the efforts CCR has made to work with local industry. Particular projects that are mentioned include those with Tops, IBC Digital, Praxair, M&T Bank, and Occidental Chemicals.

• November 15: The Spectrum publishes an extensive article on CCR, its mission, its capabilities, various projects, and the sense that these kinds of activities can help improve the national visibility of UB.
• November 6: CCR is one of the few worldwide sites that are evaluating an SGI Itanium Cluster. The Itanium Cluster is based on Intel's new 64-bit processors.
• November: SGI issues a press release on the new Intel Itanium (formerly Merced) cluster that CCR is evaluating. CCR is one of only 3 academic sites worldwide working with SGI on this exciting new technology.

• October 3: The Engineers' Angle publishes a nice article entitled "UB's Technology Hotbed: The Center for Computational Research".

• September 21: The Reporter presents an article in which President Greiner states that the Center for Computational Research has "opened a world of possibilities" to so many in so many disciplines.

• Fall: The Fall 2000 issue of UB Today discusses the Computational Science Certificate Program created by the Center for Computational Research.
• Fall: The Fall 2000 issue of UB Today presents a nice article detailing many of the new supercomputers and visual supercomputers that have been installed in CCR. It also discusses the positive impact that CCR has on UB and local industry.
• Fall: UniSci releases on story on the visit that CCR made to Congress during the Summer of 2000.
• Fall: An article appears in the Fall 2000 UB Buffalo Engineer covering the visit by NYS Governor George E. Pataki to the Center for Computational Rearch.

• July 24: CCR is mentioned in the Business First article entitled "UB is wired-& it wants future students to know".
• July 20: The Reporter features CCR in article entitled "Politicians Eye Virtual Reality: UB part of Science Day consortium that showcased research". The article states that on July 12 in the Cannon Building on Capitol Hill, members of Congress got the chance to truly experience virtual worlds, courtesy of CCR's virtual reality exhibit, which was part of Science Day. Members of Congress were able to step inside molecules of tomorrow's most potent drugs and redesign state-of-the-art factories with the click of a mouse, using 3D goggles and Fakespace Systems' ImmersaDesk, the "virtual reality" machine of the Center for Computational Research (CCR). Members and their staff learned how easy it is to use the world's first software package that virtually designs large-scale manufacturing plants. Using the same machine, members of Congress were able to "step inside" vancomycin, the "antibiotic of last resort," the 3D structure of which was determined using software developed by Dr. Russ Miller and scientists at the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute. This software, called SnB, allows researchers to solve difficult molecular structures based on X-ray diffraction data. Using the ImmersaDesk, Miller and other members of CCR how viewing the solved structure as a virtual environment helps drug designers come up with more precisely targeted pharmaceuticals. In fact, Miller stated that "Many biologically important proteins are so large you can't view the entire image in any meaningful way on a screen. So what you want to do is move around inside of the molecule so you can view portions of it at a time." During the day, Miller met with numerous members of Congress, including Sen. Charles Schumer and congressmen John LaFalce, Jack Quinn, Amo Houghton, Rick Lazio, Tom Reynolds, Gregory Meeks, James Walsh and Maurice Hinchey.
• July 12: UB was 1 of 5 universities invited to display an exhibit in the Science Coalition's 2000 Science Day, an event held on Capitol Hill. The Science Coalition is an alliance of 416 organizations, institutions and individuals, including Nobel Laureates, scientific societies, universities, and businesses. Its goal is to sustain the federal government's commitment in supporting scientific research in universities. The Center for Computational Research gave demonstrations of how UB researchers are exploiting the potential of high-performance supercomputing and high-end visualization to foster the creation and advancement of knowledge in science and engineering. As part of the day's activities, UB President Greiner gave an introduction to the talk presented by CCR director Russ Miller to the New York Congressional Delegation.
• July 12: CCR is highlighted in the UB News entitled "UB Takes Virtual Show on the Road to the Halls of Congress for Science Day 2000".
• July 12: The Center for Computational Research is mentioned in the Buffalo News article entitled "UB will offer degree in environmental study".
• July 12: The High School Workshop in Computational Science is featured the Amherst Bee article entitled "High School Students Explore High Tech World".
• July 11: An article in the Buffalo News mentions that a teacher at Nichols High School took the summer high-school student workshop offerred by the Center for Computational Research in an effort to see how to adapt the material to the high school curriculum.
• July 11: The Daily University Science News (UniSci) has an article featuring CCR, entitled "Congress Gets a Dose of Virtual Reality on Science Day".

• Spring: UB Buffalo Engineer presents an article entitled "Peace Bridge Designs Come to Life Virtually at UB".
• Spring: A piece entitled "Virtual Factories Preview Flow" appears in the Spring 2000 issue of UBResearch. This piece mentions the supporting role CCR has played in some of the research performed by the UB Virtual Reality Lab.
• Spring/Summer: UBtoday web picks highlights the visualization of the Peace Bridge in the Center of Computational Research.

• June 22: The Advanced Certificate in Computational Science Program is featured in the Reporter article entitled "Computing program approved". The article states that an advanced-certificate program in computational science has been introduced. This program is designed to train science and engineering graduate students in scientific computing. The program is a cooperative effort between the Center for Computational Research and participating departments, initially including mathematics, physics, chemical engineering and mechanical and aerospace engineering.
• June 5: A brief article appears in Business First entitled "State OKs program in scientific computing at UB".

• May 28: A piece entitled "Setting the record straight on Peace Bridge proposal" by the Public Consensus Review Panel's co-chairs appears on Page H-5 of The Buffalo News. CCR's role of assisting in visualization of the project is mentioned.
• May 26: A news brief appears in The Buffalo News that mentions CCR's new Advanced Certificate in Computational Science. It states that Science and engineering graduate students are being offered a new advanced-certificate program in scientific computing that promises to make them more marketable to prospective employers. It also states that this program was recently approved by the state Education Department and the chancellor of the State University of New York, and is designed for master's and doctoral degree candidates studying math, physics, chemical engineering and mechanical and aerospace engineering. Further, the article points out that the goal of the program, which is led by the Center for Computational Research, is to prepare graduate students for changing needs in the areas in which they will work.
• May 18: The University at Buffalo issues a news release on the creation of an Advanced Certificate in Computational Science.
• May 14: An editorial appears in The Buffalo News that mentions the success of CCR.
• May 7: An editorial appears in The Buffalo News that mentions the success of the world-class Center for Computational Research, one of the nation's leading academic supercomputing centers, which is helping to recruit scientists to WNY and is being leveraged heavily to bring significant funding to WNY.
• May 4: CCR is mentioned in the Reporter article entitled "Research goes beyond doctor's touch".
• May: Performance Technologies, Rochester, NY, issues a press release that is picked up by Gigabit on CCR's utilization of the new Nebula 8000 Fault Tolerant Ethernet System. This release is also picked up by FindArticles.com.

• April 12: A letter "Reports of UB's 'Demise' are Greatly Exaggerated" appears in the Buffalo News that mentions the Center for Computational Research as benefitting UB and Western New York.
• April 6: The Buffalo News mentions CCR in an editorial entitled "With SUNY's support, UB is thriving". The article states that the Buffalo region is benefitting from new ventures such as CCR.

• March 28-29: Russ Miller, Director of CCR, gave an invited presentation at the SGI Life Sciences Symposium, Mt. View, CA.
• March 23: CCR is mentioned in the Reporter article entitled "Assembly funds new engineering chair". The article states that a new university center will be funded by the state and focus on engineering design. The article points out that it was critical that this new center was able to leverage the existing resources and expertise in the Center for Computational Research. Without CCR, such a proposal to the State of New York would not have been viable.
• March 23: The Reporter presents a brief article entitled "Gift to CCR to speed up processor communications" to describe the donation from Myricom of a high-speed interconnect that will allow the Sun workstations on CCR's Sun Cluster to operate much more efficiently. This equipment will allow the processors to exchange information in a much more efficient manner so that processors are not sitting idle while data is being exchanged, speeding up the computing and problem solving significantly. Dr. Russ Miller states that this new networking technology will allow CCR to greatly expand its capacity, allowing CCR to provide more computing cycles at lower cost to the UB and Western New York research communities. According to Miller, fewer than 10 universities in the U.S. have the capabilities of providing high-performance computing cycles as powerful as those available in CCR. The article also states that faculty members from 40 research groups, covering 18 different departments at the university, are using CCR facilities. Students taking CCR's graduate-level courses in high-performance computing are using the cluster, along with researchers in chemistry, chemical engineering, and mechanical and aerospace engineering. In addition, the university has worked with such local research institutions as Roswell Park Cancer Institute and Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, as well as such local companies as Occidental Chemical, Praxair and M&T Bank.
• March 17: HPCWire presents a news brief on the Myricom gift to CCR.

• February 29: The Peace Bridge Public Review conducts a televised (WNED) presentation of the "draft" bridge system recommendation from the bi-national consulting team to the public consensus review panel. The virtual reality models provided through a joint venture with CCR, IBC Digital, and the UB Virtual Reality Lab is presented. In the series of articles listed below Dr. Russ Miller states that he is thrilled to be able to provide state-of-the-art technology and expertise to the community for such an important project. He goes on to say that he hopes that by presenting the designs in an immersive environment that the public will be able to gain additional insight into the project. Further, Miller states that the combination of IBC Digital's animation capabilities and the Virtual Reality Lab's expertise combined with the the resources at CCR provides an excellent example of the synergism that is possible when a New York State University and the private sector partner on issues important to the public and government. These articles also quote Ben Porcari, President of IBC Digital and Thenkurussi Kesavades, director of the Virtual Reality Lab as being excited about the project and being able to bring their expertise to the public through a partnership with CCR. These articles also focus on the ability through CCR's 3D Immersadesk to provide the public with "before" and "after" shots of various proposals for the new bridge as well as to be able to fly through, over, and around all of the various bridges, while providing perspective and models that are to scale from both the US and Canadian sides of the border crossing. It is also important to note that the articles report on the ability to be able to view the flow of traffic, impact on the local neighborhoods, and other concerns to the people who live near the area. All of the articles were incredibly positive in terms of the ability to use such state-of-the-art techniques on urban planning projects in the region and hope that these sorts of partnerships and results will become commonplace in the future. Finally, the articles state that the public is invited to make appointments with CCR to view the proposals in an immersive setting on the CCR ImmersaDesk and that CCR has expanded its normal hours of operation to better facilitate people who would like to come in both before and after normal working hours so that they may weigh in on the discussions and townhall meetings. Related articles follow.
  • April 3: The Buffalo News has an editorial by Donn Esmonde on page B-1. The editorial is entitled "Citizens panel puts sense into bridge process."
  • March 16: The Buffalo News has a commentary by Donn Esmonde on page B-1. The commentary is entitled "Virtual reality opens the eye to a better bridge."
  • March 9: The Buffalo News prints two lengthy editorials on page B-2. The first is entitled "Good bridge choices..." and the second "...Brought to life by UB."
  • March 2: Channel 4 presents a feature piece on the CCR virtual reality experience for the peace bridge on its 5:00 news.
  • March 2: The Buffalo News presents an article entitled "The Virtual Bridge" on page B-1 of the Thursday, March 2, 2000 edition of the paper.
  • March 2: The Reporter presents an extensive article with 3 images entitled "CCR offers 'virtual' bridges" in its March 2, 2000 edition.
  • March 1: Channels 2 and 4 both cover the CCR virtual reality experience of the peace bridge proposals on their evening newscasts.
  • March 1: Lockport radio station WLVL does an interview with CCR Director Russ Miller on the peace bridge virtual reality project.

• Winter: UBtoday presents a small insert on page 11 of the Winter 2000 issue mentioning the grand opening of the Center for Computational Rearch.

• February 14 An article appears in the Business First that focuses on CCR's recent SGI Origin2000 upgrade and the outreach that CCR has made to the WNY business community.
• February 6 The Buffalo News presents an article entitled "UB supercomputer gets capacity upgrade". The article quotes Dr. Russ Miller in saying that the increase in capacity allows researchers to do more work in computation-intensive subjects like fluid dynamics and computational chemistry. The article also states that the upgrade has a commercial value of $3.2 million before grants and discounts and the acquisition also includes additional workstations and a visualization computer that runs the center's 3-D imaging equipment. The SGI machine is one of three high-powered computers at the center.
• February 3: The Reporter presents an article that covers the upgrade of the SGI Origin2000 from 64 to 128 Processors. In the article Dr. Russ Miller states that fewer than 10 universities in the U.S. have an individual machine as powerful as CCR's upgraded 128-processor Origin2000 supercomputer. Miller goes on to say that CCR's compute capacity is now approximately 150 GFlops, that CCR has been leveraged extensively by faculty to help them obtain disciplinary funding, and that he expects this trend to continue. SGI comments that they are proud of the partnership that has developed between them and CCR. Miller also comments that the upgrade was necessary due to the significant demand being put on all of CCR's supercomputers. In fact, Provost Triggle called the acquisition a significant addition to our supercomputing facility, which will expand greatly both our capabilities and capacities to further solidify UB's reputation in computationally-intensive fields.

• January 30: An article in the Buffalo News covering the work of Herbert A. Hauptman and the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Insitute. The user of supercoputers for SnB is mentioned.
• January 30: An article in the Buffalo News mentions that UB unveiled its $7 million supercomputer center early in 1999, putting it among the nation's top university computing sites. Further, the article goes on to state that the Center for Computational Research will aid corporate as well as academic research, contributing to the region's digital infrastructure.
• January 30: An article in Prospectus2000, published by the Buffalo News. The article on page 49-50 covers technology in the Buffalo area and mentions the Center for Computational Research.
• January 29: The high speed Myrinet network from Myricom is installed on the Sun Linux Cluster.
• January 24: The SGI Origin 2000, upgraded to 128 processors, is now available to users.
• January 23: Russ Miller presented a talk, SUNY-Buffalo's Center for Computational Research, at the University of Rochester.
• January 7: The Center for Computational Research accepts delivery of the next 64 processors for its Origin2000 supercomputer. Once installed, the 128 processor SGI Origin2000 supercomputer will rank as one of the top 200 individual computers in the world. This machine helps solidify the Center's position as one of the leading academic supercomputing sites in the United States.
• January 5: The Center for Computational Research accepts delivery of a complete Myricom network that will be installed in the Center's 64 processor Sun Linux Cluster.
• January 3: The Center for Computational Research accepts delivery of a high-end SGI Onyx2 system, which will be used to power the 3D immersive Fakespace Systems Immersadesk.