The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
December 14, 2007
CITI Renamed to Honor Ken Kennedy
Dec. 7 -- Rice University's Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI) has been renamed in honor of its founder and Rice alumnus, Ken Kennedy '67, who died Feb. 7.
The new name -- the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology -- was announced Dec. 7 at a campus workshop celebrating Kennedy's life and accomplishments.
"Thanks to the intellectual leadership of Ken Kennedy, Rice University was able to stake a claim as one of the nation's trend-setting academic centers for computational research and education," said President David Leebron. "We remain saddened by the loss of this remarkable colleague, but are immensely grateful that he produced an endeavor of enduring excellence in computer science. It is most fitting that our highly successful multidisciplinary Computer and Information Technology Institute, founded by Ken, should bear his name."
In late 1986, Kennedy, David Hellums (dean of engineering at that time) and Sidney Burrus (then a colleague and professor of electrical and computer engineering) pitched to the advisory council of the George R. Brown School of Engineering the idea for an institute that promotes interdisciplinary research and education in computing technologies, computational engineering and information processing.
Kennedy was named CITI's first director in 1987, and the institute has grown from its original 30 faculty members and research scientists to more than 120 today. At first rooted in the departments of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computational and Applied Mathematics and Statistics, the institute now includes faculty from 17 departments and nearly every school at Rice. An early vision of the founders was to create a home for the core academic disciplines. This vision was realized in 1996 with the completion of Anne and Charles Duncan Hall, which houses the institute.
- CITI's many successes remain evident at Rice. The institute's first major spin-off was Rice's Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC), which Kennedy headed. The center was set up in 1989 with a five-year, $22.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The initial five-year award was extended for a second five-year term. Over the 10-year period, the grant amounted to more than $50 million.
- After the "sunset" of CRPC in 2001, Kennedy created the Center for High Performance Software under CITI to serve as the umbrella for research in high-performance activities at Rice.
- Connexions, which focuses on publishing open-access scholarly content, was founded under the CITI umbrella in 1999.
- Supercomputers that CITI has acquired with multimillion-dollar NSF and industry grants provide a shared resource for the benefit of any Rice faculty members whose research depends on large-scale computing.
- A graduate fellowship fund at Rice endowed by global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. was named in honor of Kennedy. The first recipient, announced last month, is Mackale Joyner, a doctoral student specializing in high-performance computing.
- CITI is involved with several lecture series that bring well-known speakers from industry and other universities to campus to discuss various aspects of information technology as well as the impact of the technology on the humanities and public policy.
"The institute's power lies in its ability to look beyond individual faculty members and departments and support the creation of teams that can successfully leverage our key research strengths," said Moshe Vardi, CITI director. "Our goals are to be a catalyst for research collaboration across school, department, center and laboratory boundaries and to encourage and develop close partnerships with industry, government and other universities."
The institute's original research focus on robotics and parallel computation has expanded into digital signal processing, distributed computing, sensor-nets, networking, communications, optimization, data modeling and analysis, bioinformatics, nanoengineering and technologies in education.
Jan Odegard, the institute's executive director, said CITI's affiliated researchers are pushing the envelope and developing tools and software that will impact society down the road and help Rice's industrial partners become more competitive. "Our research partners are able to leverage Rice's annual research investment in information technology of $30 million," he said.
Sallie Keller-McNulty, dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering, said the Computer Information and Technology Institute should be viewed as Kennedy's legacy. "For many people within and outside the Rice community, Ken represented IT research and education at Rice," she said. "We still miss his mentoring, strategic vision, education and research, and naming CITI in his honor will ensure that his invaluable contributions to Rice are never forgotten."
-----
Source: Rice University
Article Tools
Share Options
(Digg, Technorati, more)
Subscribe
Sponsored Links
New Paper: Parallel Computing Without Parallel Programming
Learn how domain experts can run VHLL programs like MATLAB® on a variety of high-performance platforms without low-level reprogramming and how to work with the largest datasets and complex algorithms without sacrificing ease of use or reducing productivity.
RSS Feeds
Feeds by Topic
- Applications
- Developer Tools
- Interconnects
- Middleware
- Networks
- Processors
- Storage
- Systems
- Visualization
Feeds by Industry
Feeds by Content Type
Feature Articles
Spider Up and Spinning Connections to All Computing Platforms at ORNL
Spider, the world's biggest Lustre-based, centerwide file system, has been fully tested to support Oak Ridge National Laboratory's new petascale Cray XT4/XT5 Jaguar supercomputer and is now offering early access to scientists.
Read More...
Wolfram Alpha: A Web-Based Application That Embraced Supercomputers
Wolfram Alpha, the Web-based computational engine introduced in May, is not a traditional supercomputing application, but relies on supercomputers to satisfy its unique requirements.
Read More...
TeraGrid '09: Student Participation Soars
There was a new energy at this year's TeraGrid '09 conference thanks to an outstanding turnout for the student program. Thanks to support from the National Science Foundation, more than 100 high school, undergraduate and graduate students were able to participate in the conference.
Read More...
Top Headlines
3D Seismic Data: Taking a Smarter Approach to Interpretation
Jul 09 | Engineer Live | The demand for computational tools to underpin the 3D seismic interpretation process has never been more apparent. Read more...
Engineering Unemployment Soared in 2Q to 8.6%
Jul 08 | EE Times | Unemployment for U.S. engineers has reached record levels, according to government figures. Read more...
Gartner Adjusts 2009 IT Spend Downward Again
Jul 08 | Network World | Global spending for 2009 projected to drop 6 percent, for a total of $3.2 trillion. Read more...
Concurrent and Parallel Are Not The Same
Jul 08 | Linux Magazine | Portability or efficiency? Neither is guaranteed when writing explicit parallel code. Read more...
800 TFLOP Real-Time Ray Tracing GPU Unveiled, Not for Gamers
Jul 07 | Ars Technica | Japanese company builds custom ASIC to accelerate real-time ray traced rendering for the auto industry. Read more...
Featured Whitepapers
Parallel Computing Without Parallel Programming
Jul 10 | | Engineers, scientists, and other domain experts depend on the productivity enabled by very high-level language (VHLL) tools like MATLAB® and Python. However, as datasets grow larger and programs get more sophisticated, ordinary desktop computers can no longer keep up. The paper explores how to run VHLL programs on high-performance platforms without low-level reprogramming. Work with large datasets and complex algorithms without sacrificing ease of use or reducing productivity.
Building High Performance Computing in a Green and Modular Solution Building Block
Apr 14 | | Many HPC IT departments are feeling the rising pressure to deliver more capacity computing and performance while trying to reduce the total cost of ownership. This white paper discusses how an environmentally-friendly and open-standards HPC building block based computing system using flexible interconnect options helps address capacity computing needs.
Multimedia
Webcast: Dell Expands HPC Access and Adoption with Intel Cluster Ready Program
Source: Addison Snell, GM/VP, Tabor Research; sponsored by Dell
Many organizations that could benefit from the use of HPC clusters find that it is complicated to get the systems up and running because of limited IT resources or the complexities of the clusters themselves. Learn how the Intel Cluster Ready program, for which Dell was an original partner, seeks to address this challenge for entry level and mid-range HPC users.
Video White Paper: Architecting a Better Network Storage Solution
BlueArc's Titan architecture represents an evolutionary step in file servers by creating a hardware-based file system that can scale bandwidth, IOPS, and overall data capacity well beyond conventional software-based devices. With its ability to virtualize a massive storage pool of up to four usable petabytes of tiered storage, Titan can scale with growing data requirements, offering a competitive advantage for businesses, researchers, or other enterprises seeking to better manage data growth while still ensuring optimal performance.
Webcast: HPC Development Solutions: Sun Studio & Sun HPC ClusterTools
Sun Studio Compilers and Tools and Sun HPC ClusterTools allow you to create high performance parallel applications for OpenSolaris, Solaris and Linux. Sun Studio Express 11/08 includes MPI performance analysis capabilities and full OpenMP 3.0 compiler support. Learn about all this and the latest in Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1.
Newsletters
Stay informed! Subscribe to HPCwire email Newsletters.
HPC Job Bank
-
HPC Systems Administrator
McGill University -
High Performance Computing Systems Administrator
Idaho National Laboratory -
Solution Engineer- HPC
Dell Inc -
Parallel Programmer
Cardiff University -
Principal Software Research Engineer
Indiana University -
Post Doctoral Researcher - Exascale Stream Computing
IBM - Visit the HPCwire Job Bank
Featured Events
-
July 13-16, 2009
WORLDCOMP'09
Las Vegas , NV
USA
-
August 24-28, 2009
Data Mining: Levels I, II, & III
Denver , CO
USA