The Center for Computation and Technology (CCT) is an interdisciplinary research center located on the campus of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
In 2003, the Center for Applied Information Technology and Learning (LSU CAPITAL) was integrated as a full research center on LSU's campus as part of the Governor's Vision 2020 plan, and then renamed the Center for Computation & Technology.
CCT's first director was Ed Seidel. Seidel led the CCT from 2003 to 2008, then accepted a position as director of the National Science Foundation's Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI). CCT faculty members Stephen David Beck and Jorge Pullin served as Interim Co-directors from 2008 to 2010. In December 2010, Joel Tohline, the interim director of the original LSU CAPITAL, was named CCT director.
Other faculty and executive staff members at the CCT included Gabrielle Allen, computer scientist and co-creator of the Cactus Framework; Thomas Sterling, former NASA scientist and co-creator of the Beowulf class cluster that is a building block of the world's supercomputers; and Susanne Brenner, recipient of the 2005 Humboldt Research Award.
CCT employs 30 full-time faculty members, all of whom hold joint appointments with other LSU departments, such as the Department of Computer Science, the College of Basic Sciences, and the College of Music and Dramatic Arts, in five Focus Areas: Core Computing Sciences, Coast to Cosmos, Material World, Cultural Computing, and System Science & Engineering. The center has a Cyberinfrastructure Development (CyD) division, originally led by Daniel S. Katz, then Shantenu Jha, and now Steven Brandt; and, in partnership with the LSU ITS department, a group called HPC@LSU that provides support for the campus and statewide cyberinfrastructure, led by Honggao Liu. CCT employees about 100 students and staff, including research and post-doctoral staff, and undergraduate and graduate students.
The CCT is primarily located in Johnston Hall on the LSU campus, but offices and cyberinfrastructure also are housed in the Frey Computing Services Center. LSU's Supercomputer, SuperMike, was located in Frey and used for nearly five years for advanced research. In June 2007, SuperMike was dismantled to make way for construction of the university's new supercomputer, Tezpur.
Named for one of the world's hottest peppers, Tezpur is nearly three times as fast as SuperMike, and is one of the most powerful supercomputers owned by any university in the nation. Tezpur was one of the 150 most powerful supercomputers in the world when it was launched. [1]
Tezpur allows CCT researchers to use the resources of the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI), a high-speed, fiber optic network that links supercomputers at the state's major research institutions, allowing greater collaboration on research that produces results faster and with greater accuracy. LONI puts the state on the National LambdaRail, allowing Louisiana researchers to collaborate with scientists around the country.
CCT also houses the Laboratory for Creative Arts & Technology (LCAT), which provides a forum and facility for faculty and researchers to explore the links between technology and creativity. The lab, located in the basement of Johnston, houses dedicated research labs for audio, video, HD collaboration and tangible technologies.
The Red Stick International Animation Festival, which was first launched by LCAT as a way of demonstrating the links between creativity and the CCT's high-performance computing, is an annual event in downtown Baton Rouge that brings together artists, animators, filmmakers, computer scientists and also animation enthusiasts to showcase the latest developments in Louisiana's digital arts and technology sectors. CCT was also home to Nemeaux, one of the nation's only clusters dedicated to the arts. After five years of service, Nemeaux was retired in October 2009.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across the country. Support for NCSA comes from the National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, business and industry partners, and other federal agencies.
The Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing (CAC), housed at Frank H. T. Rhodes Hall on the campus of Cornell University, is one of five original centers in the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Centers Program. It was formerly called the Cornell Theory Center.
Louisiana State University is an American public land-grant research university in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The university was founded in 1860 near Pineville, Louisiana, under the name Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy. The current LSU main campus was dedicated in 1926, consists of more than 250 buildings constructed in the style of Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, and the main campus historic district occupies a 650-acre (260 ha) plateau on the banks of the Mississippi River.
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is an organized research unit of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). SDSC is located at the UCSD campus' Eleanor Roosevelt College east end, immediately north the Hopkins Parking Structure.
E-Science or eScience is computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments, or science that uses immense data sets that require grid computing; the term sometimes includes technologies that enable distributed collaboration, such as the Access Grid. The term was created by John Taylor, the Director General of the United Kingdom's Office of Science and Technology in 1999 and was used to describe a large funding initiative starting in November 2000. E-science has been more broadly interpreted since then, as "the application of computer technology to the undertaking of modern scientific investigation, including the preparation, experimentation, data collection, results dissemination, and long-term storage and accessibility of all materials generated through the scientific process. These may include data modeling and analysis, electronic/digitized laboratory notebooks, raw and fitted data sets, manuscript production and draft versions, pre-prints, and print and/or electronic publications." In 2014, IEEE eScience Conference Series condensed the definition to "eScience promotes innovation in collaborative, computationally- or data-intensive research across all disciplines, throughout the research lifecycle" in one of the working definitions used by the organizers. E-science encompasses "what is often referred to as big data [which] has revolutionized science... [such as] the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN... [that] generates around 780 terabytes per year... highly data intensive modern fields of science...that generate large amounts of E-science data include: computational biology, bioinformatics, genomics" and the human digital footprint for the social sciences.
David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Previously, he served as the Chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Computational Science & Engineering, where he was also a founding professor, and the executive director of High-Performance Computing at the Georgia Tech College of Computing. In 2007, he was named the first director of the Sony Toshiba IBM Center of Competence for the Cell Processor at Georgia Tech.
United States federal research funders use the term cyberinfrastructure to describe research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization and other computing and information processing services distributed over the Internet beyond the scope of a single institution. In scientific usage, cyberinfrastructure is a technological and sociological solution to the problem of efficiently connecting laboratories, data, computers, and people with the goal of enabling derivation of novel scientific theories and knowledge.
TeraGrid was an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011.
The US National Center for Atmospheric Research is a US federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) managed by the nonprofit University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). NCAR has multiple facilities, including the I. M. Pei-designed Mesa Laboratory headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. Studies include meteorology, climate science, atmospheric chemistry, solar-terrestrial interactions, environmental and societal impacts.
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, United States, is an advanced computing research center that is based on comprehensive advanced computing resources and supports services to researchers in Texas and across the U.S. The mission of TACC is to enable discoveries that advance science and society through the application of advanced computing technologies. Specializing in high performance computing, scientific visualization, data analysis & storage systems, software, research & development and portal interfaces, TACC deploys and operates advanced computational infrastructure to enable the research activities of faculty, staff, and students of UT Austin. TACC also provides consulting, technical documentation, and training to support researchers who use these resources. TACC staff members conduct research and development in applications and algorithms, computing systems design/architecture, and programming tools and environments.
Cactus is an open-source, problem-solving environment designed for scientists and engineers. Its modular structure enables parallel computation across different architectures and collaborative code development between different groups. Cactus originated in the academic research community, where it was developed and used over many years by a large international collaboration of physicists and computational scientists.
Edward Seidel is an American academic administrator and scientist serving as the president of the University of Wyoming since July 1, 2020. He previously served as the Vice President for Economic Development and Innovation for the University of Illinois System, as well as a Founder Professor in the Department of Physics and a professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois from 2014 to 2017.
The Red Stick International Animation Festival is an annual event is hosted by the Lab for Creative Arts & Technologies (LCAT), a research group within the Louisiana State University's Center for Computation and Technology. The first festival took place from April 21 until April 23, 2005, and has occurred annually since in the Downtown Arts District in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The 2005 festival drew over 1200 attendees. In 2006, just over 2000 people attended, and in 2007, over 4000 people attended festival events.
Kevin Franklin, EdD was born in Virginia, where he received degrees in psychology and education from Old Dominion University. He holds a Doctorate of Education in organization and leadership from the University of San Francisco. Formerly executive director of the University of California system-wide Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) and a deputy director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), Franklin was appointed as executive director of the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science, (I-CHASS), research professor, education policy, organization and leadership, adjunct associate professor, African American studies, and senior research scientist for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in July 2007. In addition Franklin was appointed associate director for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in 2014.
The iPlant Collaborative, renamed Cyverse in 2017, is a virtual organization created by a cooperative agreement funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to create cyberinfrastructure for the plant sciences (botany). The NSF compared cyberinfrastructure to physical infrastructure, "... the distributed computer, information and communication technologies combined with the personnel and integrating components that provide a long-term platform to empower the modern scientific research endeavor". In September 2013 it was announced that the National Science Foundation had renewed iPlant's funding for a second 5-year term with an expansion of scope to all non-human life science research.
The LSU Department of Finance is part of the E. J. Ourso College of Business of Louisiana State University, located on the university's main campus in Baton Rouge, LA. The department currently consists of 30 faculty members, including five chairs and several professorships. Some of its features include the Securities Market Analysis Research and Trading (SMART) Lab and the Real Estate Research Institute. The department is both a CFP Board-Registered Program and a CFA Program Partner offering curricula for undergraduate and graduate students interested in careers in corporate finance, asset management, real estate, insurance, banking, financial planning and business law through B.S, M.S., and Ph.D. programs.
Francine Berman is an American computer scientist, and a leader in digital data preservation and cyber-infrastructure. In 2009, she was the inaugural recipient of the IEEE/ACM-CS Ken Kennedy Award "for her influential leadership in the design, development and deployment of national-scale cyberinfrastructure, her inspiring work as a teacher and mentor, and her exemplary service to the high performance community". In 2004, Business Week called her the "reigning teraflop queen".
Vladimir Voevodin is a computer scientist, professor at Lomonosov Moscow State University, the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics, Deputy Director of MSU Research Computing Center, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor, Dr.Sc.
Ilkay Altintas is a Turkish-American data and computer scientist, and researcher in the domain of supercomputing and high-performance computing applications. Since 2015, Altintas has served as chief data science officer of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she has also served as founder and director of the Workflows for Data Science Center of Excellence (WorDS) since 2014, as well as founder and director of the WIFIRE lab. Altintas is also the co-initiator of the Kepler scientific workflow system, an open-source platform that endows research scientists with the ability to readily collaborate, share, and design scientific workflows.
Gabrielle D. Allen is a British and American computational astrophysicist known for her work in astrophysical simulations and multi-messenger astronomy, and as one of the original developers of the Cactus Framework for parallel scientific computation. She is a professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Wyoming.