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2005 Media Coverage
- Dr. Russ Miller was Director of CCR during this period.
- Dr. Russ Miller co-Founded the New York State/Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics (and Life Sciences) in 2001.
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November 30: The article
"Buffalo Scientists Lead New York Grid Research" in Science Grid this
Week describes CCR's participation
in Dr. Russ Miller's
Grid Computing Research Group's efforts in a statewide grid computing initiative. Many of the details of this grid computing initiative are presented
in the description given below of the November 14th article.
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November 21: MTV2 airs the sixth
episode of VideoMods produced by IBC Digital and rendered at CCR.
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November 16: Business
First reports on
Dr. Miller's $800,000 peer-reviewed grant to build a computational grid across
New York state in the article
"National Science Foundation boosts area research".
Some of the details presented in this article are also described in the November 14 article below.
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November 14: In the article
"Buffalo Gateway 'Rocks' the Teragrid" Teragrid Director Charlie
Catlett comments on how fast CCR was able to integrate Teragrid resources into
its grid dashboard monitoring system.
The article states that since its inception in 1998, CCR has grown
to one of the leading supercomputing sites in the world. Currently, CCR
supports approximately 140 projects in 40 departments across campus. In
addition, it also supports more than a dozen local companies and institutions.
Key areas of support include visualization, urban planning, science,
engineering, media, finance, animation, medicine, and management, to name
a few. Outreach and economic development include projects with the city,
state, K-12, local law firms, local animation companies, and local companies
working in urban planning. CCR's efforts can be seen in places ranging from
30+ videos on MTV to local public planning efforts.
As part of Dr. Russ Miller's research agenda, CCR has long been involved in a variety of grid
efforts. Dr. Miller, and his associate, grid computational scientist
Dr. Mark L. Green, are leading the effort to integrate advances made in
CCR through Miller's Grid Computing Research Group with the Open Science Grid.
Therefore, CCR felt like it had just won a "Grammy" when TeraGrid was integrated into CCR's grid environment this
past summer. In fact, the integration occurred in "record" time, according to
TeraGrid Director Charlie Catlett.
The article continues, by stating that while CCR
is only seven-years-old, under Miller's direction,
it has been leveraged enormously,
bringing nearly $500M into Western New York.
One of the most visible projects is the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics, which includes
SUNY-Buffalo, the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, and the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute.
While much of CCR's grid development was supported by Dr. Miller's
NSF/ITR grant, a new CRI grant from NSF has enabled
the formation of a Western New York Grid consisting of CCR, Hauptman-Woodward Institute (HWI), Niagara
University, and SUNY-Geneseo. This effort, also under the direction of
Dr. Miller, enables CCR to harden areas of its "grass roots" New York State grid
effort, which includes four SUNY campuses (Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo, and Geneseo), Columbia University,
Niagara University, Canisius College, and the Hauptman-Woodward institute.
"We're going to add the Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Rochester, and Cornell," Green says, "via the Western New York Grid for
Engineering and Science."
With 10 major cross-institutional research groups, CCR formed the Grid Resources for Advanced Science and
Engineering (GRASE) Virtual Organization. The GRASE VO concentrates on structural biology, groundwater modeling,
earthquake engineering, computational chemistry, and the integration of geographic information systems with
biohazard research. The connections among the grass-roots grid institutions and these groups all run over New
York's NYSERnet 32-lambda backbone.
"The 10 major collaborations are driving our grid efforts," Green notes. "Each group has an application manager who
uses an API to port their applications to our ACDC Grid Portal and Grid and Operations Dashboards." The applications
include SnB (Shake-and-Bake) and BnP (Buffalo-'n'-Pittsburgh) for molecular structure determination and phasing; a
suite of codes for groundwater modeling; a major earthquake engineering code; Q-Chem for quantum chemistry,
and a code called Titan for modeling hazardous geophysical mass flows.
Miller and Green are particularly pleased to have added the TeraGrid capabilities to the mix available at CCR. "Having
access to these kinds of computational resources really changes the way scientists think about their projects," Green
says. "They can ask more challenging questions and ask them more often. As models and simulations become more
realistic, their predictive power grows, and their value to society changes."
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November 11: CCR's work on the MTV2 video mods project is
highlighted in the article
"UB aids MTV2 in video mash-ups" in UB's
The Spectrum newspaper.
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November 10: Russ Miller receives an $800,000 grant to develop WNY grid
with HWI, Niagara University, and SUNY Geneseo. Details can be found in the UB
news release:
"NSF Funds WNY Computational and Data Science Grid". This story
was also covered by the
UB Reporter.
The article states that the University at Buffalo and several other
educational institutions have been awarded $800,000 by the National Science
Foundation to establish a Western New York Computational and Data Science Grid.
The grid will support research that requires high-end computational resources,
education in computational science and engineering and outreach in
grid computing. A computational grid is a state-of-the-art platform in which computers, storage devices and visualization systems from different institutions can be utilized transparently by researchers to solve computationally demanding problems, according to
Russ Miller, Ph.D.,
principal investigator and UB Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Several years ago, under previous NSF funding, Miller established an
Advanced Computational Data Center (ACDC) Grid, which has been used by
faculty, students and staff at UB and other Western New York institutions.
The grid is expanding continually and being used internationally while inter-operating with numerous other grids.
The new grant will allow UB, the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute (HWI), Niagara University and the State University of New York College at Geneseo to establish formally and expand the Western New York portion of the ACDC-Grid.
"At UB, these funds will allow us to design and deploy critical grid-based infrastructure that will allow for outreach and training to our sister organizations so that they can get up to speed on grid computing. This will allow
Hauptman-Woodward, Niagara University and SUNY Geneseo to reach out to
resources on additional grids, such as TeraGrid, through the ACDC-Grid Portal or as independent grid nodes."
Miller explained that computational grids, which are a key part of "cyberinfrastructure," are critical to 21st-century discovery.
He said that "the federal government recognizes that not only is
cyberinfrastructure critical to discovery across a wide range of disciplines
in our digital, data-driven society, but that academia must train students
in these areas in order to compete in our knowledge-based economy.
By educating students about how to work with computational and data grids, UB, Niagara and SUNY Geneseo will be putting students in the strongest possible position in terms of their future employment."
Co-principal investigators on the grant include Charles Weeks, Ph.D.,
senior research scientist at HWI,
Mary McCourt, Ph.D., associate professor of chemistry at Niagara University,
and Homma Farian, computer science lecturer at SUNY Geneseo.
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October 28: MTV2 airs the fifth
episode
of VideoMods produced by IBC Digital and rendered at CCR.
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October 27: The UB
Reporter sums up the white paper prepared by the Integrated
Nanostructured Systems planning committee in the article
"Collaborations, new hires needed." CCR's visualization and
modeling capabilities are mentioned as a strength of the University when
planning for the future.
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October 26: CCR's director, Russ Miller, is listed as an
example of one of UB's "top flight academics" in the
Spectrum
article "A pair of UB aces."
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October 26: CCR mentioned as "the most mysterious and
intriguing spot on campus" in the Spectrum
article "UB hidden in
plain sight."
The article states that perhaps the most mysterious and intriguing spot
on campus is the Center for Computational Research.
Dr. Russ Miller,
the director of CCR explains that "the machines we have enable researchers
to create models to test and apply hypotheses to complex phenomena."
CCR also provides in-depth visualizations of situations and ideas that are difficult to create.
"If you want to see what should happen in the case of another hurricane like Katrina, you can't go create it," Miller said. That's where the CCR comes in.
Miller explains that there are about 140 active projects with 6-8
students per project. That is, CCR is being used by many hundreds of students.
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October 26: EMC highlights
CCR in their Customer Profile
brochure.
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October 3: Next
Generation highlights the work done for the MTV2 show VideoMods by
IBC Digital and CCR.
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August 31: Work done by CCR for the NYS Thruway Authority is
featured on their project websites for
high-speed E-ZPass lanes and the
Williamsville Toll Barrier Improvement Project.
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August 29: The article
"Storage by the Cluster" in ComputerWorld
describes CCR's solution for cost-effective storage using EMC hardware and
IBRIX.
The article states that
Russ Miller
runs a monster of a server cluster that eats storage at an incredible rate.
The bandwidth requirements alone on his 22TFLOPS system force Miller to
look outside the storage box, so to speak, for better throughput and scalability.
As the director of the Center for Computational Research at the University at Buffalo, Miller oversees a supercomputer comprising 6,600 processors that is used by the university and many businesses in western New York.
To support all that computational power, Miller turned to a clustered storage system that could alleviate bottlenecks and automatically load-balance and grow on the fly to accommodate user demand.
Like many IT managers who have seen the benefits of server clusters, Miller
chose to try the relatively new technology of storage clusters as a means of
attaining a fully redundant infrastructure that's highly scalable and easy to
manage. The article goes on to say that clustering provides massive throughput
because of an increased port
count that comes from cobbling many storage servers together into a single pool of disks and processors, all working on a similar task and all able to share the same data.
Management functions are distributed across the storage server farm. To an application server, the farm looks like a single, block-level storage system. Storage capacity can be added without disrupting applications running on the cluster.
In April, Miller selected a system from Dell Inc. and Billerica, Mass.-based
Ibrix that gave him storage read rates of 2.3GB/sec. and about half that rate
for data writes - far above what any monolithic storage array could produce,
he says.
"We don't have any single points of failure. So if and when we need to make
additional investments in storage, we can do that without any major downtime
or major reconfiguration. We didn't see any downside to going this
route," Miller says.
Ibrix is a clustered file system than runs on hosts, but it can also run on storage arrays. For example, the internal disk drives on low-end Dell servers can be combined to create a storage pool. The result is a compute farm that also clusters its storage. "It adds no greater complexity by adding more servers to the cluster," Miller says.
In the future, Miller notes, CCR will consider using commodity servers to create a storage cluster, "so long as the system meets the needs of our users and staff in terms of performance and reliability."
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August 26: MTV2 airs the third
episode
of VideoMods produced by IBC Digital and rendered at CCR.
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August 24:
The Channel WB49 newscast at 10:00 p.m. features a segment on the work IBC
Digital and CCR produced for MTV2's VideoMods show.
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August 23: Buffalo News article
"UB supercomputer not getting enough power" discusses the current
production level of the U2 cluster and the fact that there is only enough power
to enable 2/3 of the machines. However, the cluster is handling projects such
as the extensive rendering of graphics for a local company's animated series
for MTV2 , as well as high performance scientific computations. This story was
also covered by:
- August 8: An
article appears in the
Buffalo News
that discusses CCR's efforts in traffic simulation, visualization, and urban
design projects, to name a few. This includes work with local companies,
including IBC Digital and TVGA Consultants.
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July 24: In the article
"Making of a Remix: MTV2's Video Mods"
in Wired Magazine the process by which IBC Digital and CCR are developing
the digital animation for MTV2 is described.
- July 24:
An off-beat
article "What's in a name?" appears
in the
Buffalo News. The article
discusses the naming convention that CCR Director
Dr. Russ Miller
devised for resources in the Center for Computational Research.
All resources in CCR are named after artists inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The article further mentions that the most recent supercomputer added
to CCR's lineup is named U2, while
other systems are named after superstars including the Beatles, Led Zeppelin,
Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin, to name but a small fraction.
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July 22: MTV2 airs the second
episode
of VideoMods produced by IBC Digital and rendered at CCR.
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July 22:
WIVB Channel 4 runs a segment featuring the work IBC Digital and CCR produced
for MTV2's VideoMods show.
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July 22: CCR uses new Dell cluster to render more videos for
MTV2's VideoMods program. Full story -
"MTV2's "Video Mods" Boosts IBC Digital, with Help from UB's Supercomputers".
This story was also carried by:
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July 21:
"University rocks with clustered storage"
featured on SearchStorage.com describes how CCR's newest addition fits in with
the old.
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July 21: UB
Reporter article
"New Dell cluster nearly doubles CCR's capacity"
describes CCR's latest aquisition.
Much of this material was also covered in the article
of July 13, listed below.
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July 18: "IBRIX Segmented File System Delivers Exceptional I/O
Performance; IBRIX Fusion Demonstrates 2.3 Gigabytes per Second of Aggregate
Throughput on an 834 Node Cluster at The Center for Computational Research at
the University at Buffalo" article featured on the following websites:
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July 15:
"Buffalo Cluster's a Grid Cornerstone" on the
Next-Gen Data Center Forum
describes how CCR's new Dell cluster will be used in the New York State grid.
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July 14: The UB Reporter article
"Rock Clusters: UB Supercomputers Named for Rock-N-Roll Legends" describes
CCR's unique naming convention used to help our users and staff identify
resources. This story was also carried on the following websites:
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July 13:
"UB's New Dell Cluster Nearly Doubles Center's Capacity"
reports the UB Reporter.
The article states that in response to the soaring demand for computational
power by the hundreds of researchers who depend on it, the Center for
Computational Research has installed a new Dell high-performance computing
cluster. The cluster, with 1,668 processors, nearly doubles the Center's computing capacity. The article notes that it was purchased with
$2.3 million in federal funds appropriated as a result of the efforts of
Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Charles E. Schumer.
The new cluster will support the work of researchers working in numerous
areas ranging from chemistry to engineering, visualization to data mining.
"This installation will increase dramatically the pace of research and discovery at UB," said Russ Miller, Ph.D., director of CCR and UB Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
"The expansion effectively will double our processing speed," he continued. "It will expand the capability of computing we can offer to our users, where large numbers of processors are used simultaneously to solve an individual problem, as well as our capacity computing, where the results of many independent, single-processor results are combined to solve a problem.
This increase in throughput will enable researchers to undertake calculations at an entirely new scale. Researchers will be able to tackle larger problems, consider them in more detail, and address problems that would have been intractable without such a system."
Even during the installation, Miller explained, the Dell cluster has proven to be very productive as it was used extensively in a capacity fashion on a joint project with IBC Digital, a Buffalo animation company, in order to render a series of animated videos currently being shown on MTV2.
One of the first projects that will be supported by the new Dell cluster will be a cutting-edge combination of demanding theoretical calculations and experimental studies designed to help understand how certain forms of cancer originate in the body. If successful, such an understanding could lead to improved methods to treat certain forms of cancer.
According to Miller, in today's society, research and discovery often is driven by simulation and modeling, which requires high-end computing, including storage, networking, computing and visualization.
"To achieve this, it is critical to build a balanced high-end infrastructure that incorporates the efficient collection, organization, processing, visualization and distribution of data," Miller said.
John Mullen, vice president for Dell's higher education business, said clusters have become the platform for a growing number of the fastest supercomputers in the world.
"More than 300 of the world's fastest supercomputers are using Intel processors, and most of those are labeled 'clusters,'" Mullen said. "Dell's supercomputing strategy has always centered on a standards-based, scalable enterprise architecture, which offers customers flexibility and the most computing power for their money."
CCR's new Dell system has a theoretical peak performance of more than 10 trillion floating point operations per second (TFlops), with an anticipated sustained performance of more than 7 Tflops. The internal EMC storage system contains 30 TBytes of disk.
The installation brings the number of processors in CCR to nearly 7,000, extending the center's theoretical peak performance from approximately 12 Tflops to approximately 22 TFlops. (One floating point is the number of calculations a computer can perform each second.)
This high-end commodity-based Dell system consists of more than 1600 of Intel's latest processors, packaged two processors per server, connected to each other by two networks: a high-speed (GigE) Ethernet network from Force10 and a state-of-the-art high-performance network from Myricom.
In addition, the system features a large internal storage network consisting of hardware from storage leader EMC and parallel file system software from IBRIX that is essential to accommodate the demanding file transfer rates needed to support the cluster's computing power.
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July 13: The Buffalo News
describes the new CCR Dell installation in
"UB upgrades it's supercomputer with cluster of servers".
Dr. Russ Miller
discusses the wide range of research that is performed on resources in
the Center for Computational Research, the ability to generate knowledge
from data, and the fact that the $2.3M required for this upgrade was
secured by Rep. Tom Reynolds, Sen. Chuck Schumer, and Sen. Hillary Clinton.
In addition, Dell made a substantial in-kind contribution that allowed for
such a significant 10TFlops system, consisting of over 800 Dell PowerEdge nodes,
to be acquired.
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July 12: Dell issues a
press release announcing CCR's new 834-node cluster made up of
PowerEdge 1850 and 2850 servers.
A variety of articles state that the
Center for Computational Research has installed an
834-node Dell high-performance computing cluster.
The new cluster is made up of Dell PowerEdge SC1425, 1850 and the award-winning Dell PowerEdge 2850 servers.
This system has a theoretical peak performance of more than 10 TFlops
, with an anticipated sustained performance of more than 7 Tflops.
The installation brings the number of processors in UB's CCR to nearly 7,000
and extends the center's theoretical peak performance from approximately 12 trillion floating point operations per second (TFlops) to approximately 22 TFlops, ranking it among the 50 fastest supercomputing clusters in the world.
CCR will use the new cluster to support research in life sciences, physical sciences, engineering and visualization.
Even during installation, this machine was used extensively to render a number of animated videos that are currently being shown on MTV2.
Russ Miller, Ph.D.,
director of CCR and UB Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, said today's digital-driven society, in which research
and discovery is often driven by simulation and modeling, requires high-end computing, including storage, networking, computing and visualization.
To achieve this, it is critical to build a balanced high-end infrastructure that incorporates the efficient collection, organization, processing, visualization and distribution of data."
John Mullen, vice president of Dell's higher education business, said clusters have become the platform for a growing number of the fastest supercomputers in the world.
This story was also carried on the following websites:
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June 30: CCR Director, Dr. Russ Miller, makes the
UB Reporter's "Kudos" list
for his induction into the "Amherst Avenue of Athletes."
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June 24: MTV2 airs the first
episode
of this season's VideoMods produced by IBC Digital and CCR.
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June 24: "The
Making of a Virtual Rock Star" article in the
Buffalo News describes CCR's work with IBC
Digital on the MTV2 Video Mods show.
This effort will bring in over $1M to the local economy.
Dr. Russ Miller
describes the necessity for high-end computing that is required to produce
such high-quality animation, inclduing the mathematics (geometry) that
is required to produce each of the 30 images per second that is aired in
the final version of each video. The article also discusses that these
videos take characters from current video games and are used to tell a
story matched to a video from a currently active band. In fact, Ben Porcari,
President of IBC Digital, discusses details of the videos, including the use
of Christina Aguilera's dancers, who were outfitted with motion sensors so
that their dancing could be attached to the video game characters in one of
the videos. This story was also carried
on the following websites:
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June 23:
HPC Wire quotes CCR's Director, Dr. Russ Miller, on how Myrinet's new
10 gigabit ethernet products should help high performance computing and
visualization in the article
"Myricom branches out to tap 10Gb ethernet market".
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June 20: eWeek's article
"New 10 Gigabit Ethernet Products Bring HPC to the Enterprise"
incorporates comments from Dr. Russ Miller, CCR Director.
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June 20: In conjunction with IBC
Digital, CCR is creating videos for this season's Video Mods show
on MTV. See a sneak peek
(to air Friday, June 24 at 8pm EST)
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June 17: Several CCR staff members will be presenting at the
UBit Fair 2005. The UB Reporter has a
general description
on the event.
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June 8:
Dr. Russ Miller was inducted into the "Amherst Avenue of
Athletes" for his "outstanding and distinguished contributions to the community
in the area of athletics" as president of the Amherst Youth Basketball program.
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June 3: CCR's latest visualization projects are described in
the
UB Reporter article
"For Urban Planning or Litigating, Simulations Are Persuasive Tools - UB's
Supercomputing Center Makes Virtual Traffic Make Sense to the Public"
The article states that by harnessing the power of computational techniques
initially developed on academic supercomputers,
urban planners, engineers and even litigators are creating vivid
animations of urban life to solve problems ranging from urban sprawl to
traffic jams to site selection.
Working in partnerships with companies and agencies, the Center for Computational Research has developed software that applies these state-of-the-art
technologies to simulate traffic at the Peace Bridge, an important
international crossing point between the U.S. and Canada;
at a major league soccer stadium in Rochester, N.Y.,
and for a major roadway improvement project for the Florida Department of Transportation in Miami.
CCR also has developed software that allows juries to visualize how a particular automobile accident occurred.
So far, the UB center's capabilities have allowed two upstate New York firms to grow their businesses in new markets with significant growth potential.
"CCR is my secret weapon," said Charles Hixon, founder and administrator of Bergmann Associates Visualization in Rochester.
Bergmann Associates Visualization group is negotiating with a major engineering firm to utilize Streetscenes, a software package developed at CCR, to
simulate traffic at Xanadu, the massive sports, retail, entertainment and
shopping complex planned adjacent to New Jersey's Meadowlands Sports Complex.
"Streetscenes has opened up so many doors for me, it's been an incredible business development tool," said Hixon.
Also as a result of its collaboration with CCR, TVGA Consultants in Elma is able to provide high-end, three-dimensional accident visualization services to its clients, which include attorneys and insurance companies.
"CCR's expertise allowed TVGA to transform these calculations into a state-of-the-art 3D animation, thus realistically animating the story that used to be told to juries through storyboards," said Haseeb Ghumman, who heads TVGA's Accident Reconstruction Plus division. (The TVGA video may be viewed at http://www.accidentreconstructionplus.com/Visualization.htm.)
"What we do is take the traffic engineering data and present them in an animated, interactive and realistic fashion so that it's easy for the general public to get a mental picture of what happened," explained Dr. Russ Miller, Ph.D., CCR director and UB Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering.
The CCR Urban Simulation and Visualization Team also works with the City of Buffalo and Robert G. Shibley, professor of architecture and director of the Urban Design Project in the UB School of Architecture and Planning, on the Peace Bridge Gateway Improvement Project and the Olmsted Park Conservancy, and with Ben Porcari at IBC Digital Inc. and BuffLink on the Buffalo-Niagara Medical Campus.
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May 19: CCR's new position under The Center of Excellence in
Bioinformatics may make it easier to attract federal and state funding
according to the article in the
UB Reporter,
"Center of Excellence Moves Forward."
In numerous related articles, the faculty question this decision and the
top-down manner in which the decision was made. That is, making such
a monumental decision without faculty input, without
a plan for the prime space on the North campus that has been refurbished to the
tune of $7M+ in order to accomodate CCR and its future expansion, and without
consideration to the faculty and the research programs that CCR is currently
supporting. This article states that CCR will (continue) to do an excellent
job of supporting the Bioinformatics Center that it enabled. Senior Vice
Provost Bruce Holm,
in support of this very controversial decision by the Provost, states that
the decision for the Center for Computational Research to report to the
director of the Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics, rather than directly
to the Provost, will better position CCR to attract funds from the NIH and
the state, while continuing to serve the needs of the broader community.
In related articles, it is pointed out by numerous faculty that this
is quite illogical and flies in the face of the mission, vision, and
enormously successful practices of CCR, a proven world-class resource available
to enable research and scholarship at the University and in Western New York.
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May 18: The Chronicle of Higher
Education describes how budget cuts at the National Science Foundation
may impact the future of supercoming in the article
"Budget Cuts at NSF May Signal a Crisis in Computing."
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May 13: The Buffalo News commentary
"Ray of hope shines from silver facade" describes potential for new
Life Sciences complex.
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April 21-22:
CCR takes delivery of a new 10TF Dell Cluster that includes a complete Myrinet
system, a Force10 backbone, and an EMC SAN.
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April 8: CCR's
Russ Miller recommends Dell continues its excellent job of listening
closely to customer input on emerging technologies in the story "Services,
printing to help Dell hit $80B in revenue." Miller points out that he has worked closely and extremely successfully with Dell for a number
of years and on a number of large projects. He says that such a vendor-client
relationship is rare and mutually beneficial. This story is reported by the following news
agencies:
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April 7: An article in the
Reporter describes the second UB2020 "envisioning retreat" in the
article
"Computational 'wish list' developed". Faculty listed CCR as an
important resource to fund for future success at UB.
The article states that the group tackled the identification of fundamental
research that would best support those disciplinary foci and distinguish UB.
The Center for Computational Research as a University-wide resource was at
the top of the list. Dr. Russ Miller discussed the need for fast networking and ubiquitous computing.
As a member of the coordinating committee, Miller
noted that those and many other requirements are all research areas in and of themselves, rather than commodity items that can be purchased off-the-shelf.
In addition, Venu Govindaraju outlined the four foci of excellence that had
been established for the area of information and computing technology by
the UB 2020 Academic Planning Committee, including "Computation, simulation
and modeling, described as broadly multidisciplinary, covering more than 25 academic departments and for which the Center for Computational Research provides critical infrastructure."
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March 24: An
article in the Reporter covering
the nanotechnology and nanomaterials retreat concludes that the "Preservation of the Center for Computational Research as a university-wide resource" is critical
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February 19: CCR's latest upgrade and move into the Center of
Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences appears in a
Buffalo News Business Today article
"Supercomputer getting upgrade". Provost Tripathi and Senior Vice Provost Holm discuss their rationale
for the significant change in reporting structure for the Center for
Computational Research. They state that this will strengthen the new
Bioinformatics Center. However, numerous faculty are concerned that this
university-wide resource will now be part of a small niche center at the
university and with a move of CCR downtown, will not be much tougher for
faculty, students, and staff to interact with the personnel in CCR. In fact,
there is faculty concern about faculty and student recruiting as well as
the lack of input from the faculty concerning this major development. Further,
the faculty are concerned over Provost Tripathi's unilateral decision to
cut the budget in CCR, reduce the staff, and require the Bioinformatics Center,
under the direction of Dr. Holm, to support CCR.
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January 21: In a report prepared by Erich Bloch (former head
of NSF), Dr. Bloch states that "Because of the importance of CCR to work done
across the University, UB ... should focus on this resource, giving it the
management support it deserves and encouraging the people in the Center to
continue on their self charted pace."
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