The Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS) at Stony Brook University will celebrate its grand opening on Friday, September 18 with a ribbon cutting followed by a reception and tours of the new 6,000-square-foot facility located next to the Life Sciences Building. The campus community is invited to attend.
The IACS has a 45-seat seminar room, conference rooms, state-of-the-art AV systems, a 10-gigabit network, and a high bandwidth network. The new facility also houses a computer cluster that includes: Handy, 40 Intel Sandybridge nodes supported by the Start-Up New York program; LIRED, 100 Intel Haswell nodes supported by a $1 million Long Island Regional Economic Development Council grant; and an NSF MRI (due to be online in nine months), supported by a $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation for Major Research Instrumentation (matched by $300K from NYSTAR and $300K internally). These high-performance computers play an ever-increasing role in cutting-edge, cross-disciplinary research and will change the way science gets its answers, industry develops its products and society analyzes its needs.
The IACS’ mission is to make sustained advances in the fundamental techniques of computation and in high-impact applications, with a vision that by 2017 it will be an internationally recognized institute having vibrant multidisciplinary research and education programs, and demonstrated economic benefit to New York State.
“The interdisciplinary IACS will make fundamental advances in how we compute to harness the full power of computers of all sizes, and to greatly broaden the impact of computation by making it more accessible to new researchers, disciplines and industries,” said Professor Robert J. Harrison, a distinguished expert in high-performance computing and director of the IACS. Before coming to Stony Brook, he was at the University of Tennessee Knoxville and Oak Ridge National Laboratory as director of the Joint Institute of Computational Sciences, professor of chemistry and corporate fellow. He also has extensive service on national advisory committees.
Right now the IACS staff is made up of 11 core faculty members who represent a cross-disciplinary range of fields such as physics, computer science, applied mathematics and statistics, geosciences, sociology and the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences; 23 associated faculty, the majority of whom are from Stony Brook, but also includes faculty from the College of New Rochelle, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Brookhaven National Laboratory and A*STAR in Singapore; and 43 core and 60 affiliate graduate students who have access to fellowships, awards, seminars, workshops, and a new Advanced Graduate Certificate in Data and Computational Science and Engineering.
The IACS began with a transformational $10 million anonymous donation plus matching funds of equal value from the Simons Foundation. The institute works closely with the Computational Science Center at Brookhaven National Laboratory, which specializes in large-scale data analysis.
For more information about the IACS, please visit www.iacs.stonybrook.edu. To attend the opening event, please RSVP by Monday, September 14, to (631) 632-4466 or advancementevents@stonybrook.edu.
Add comment