HPCwire: CITI Renamed to Honor Ken Kennedy

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

December 14, 2007

CITI Renamed to Honor Ken Kennedy

by B.J. Almond and Patrick Kurp

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

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

C-DAC announces plans for a petaflop system; IBM researchers are working on vertical integration techniques to extend Moore's Law another 15 years. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations

The Moscow State University supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of tripling its processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.
Read More...

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html