HPCwire: Liu Awarded $400,000 NSF CAREER Grant

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

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

October 05, 2009

Liu Awarded $400,000 NSF CAREER Grant

Oct. 5 -- Lamar University computer science professor Jane Liu has been awarded a $400,000 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development award, university officials said.

Liu is an assistant professor of computer science with research interests in computer architecture with an emphasis on high-performance, low-power and cost-effective memory system design for chip multiprocessing, embedded systems and system-on-chip.

"We are all so proud of Dr. Liu, who is the first Lamar University faculty member ever to receive this major award from the National Science Foundation," said Steven Doblin, provost and vice president for academic affairs. "She exemplifies the type of teacher-scholar we try to attract in every faculty search; someone who is an outstanding instructor as well as a successful researcher who involves undergraduates and graduate students in her work.

"Her receipt of a NSF CAREER award is not only national recognition of her accomplishments and potential as a computer scientist and as a faculty member, but also adds significant prestige to being a member of Lamar University's community of scholars. Of course, it is our students who are the ultimate beneficiaries of Dr. Liu's commitment, hard work and talent."

A member of Lamar's computer science faculty since 2004, Liu holds a master's of science and the Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. She holds a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunication, Beijing, China.

"The National Science Foundation only makes this award to people they think will go on to make a significant mark in their respective fields," said Stuart Wright, director of research in Lamar's Office of Research and Sponsored Programs. "It is a very prestigious award."

The career development program offers the foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Such activities build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.

Liu's research proposes to improve the speed and energy efficiency of computers that use multicore systems. There is enormous demand for these multicore systems in high-performance and data-intensive applications. Her program will stimulate the research interest of promising undergraduates who are economically challenged and underrepresented, to motivate and equip them to pursue advanced degrees, and to fortify computing education in K-12 schools that serve mostly minority or low-income students.

Liu's research will analyze the redundancy and pattern in the information exchanged between the processor and memory system to evaluate the potential of compression in improving performance, while reducing power consumption and the cost of interconnects. One goal is to create novel information-pattern-aware compression techniques to significantly improve interconnect bandwidth and alleviate the ever-worsening energy bottleneck. She also plans a comprehensive evaluation of design tradeoffs between performance, power and cost using experimental simulations to refine and optimize the compression models for a broad range of applications including high-performance computing, data-intensive applications and handheld devices.

Liu's education strategies include introducing freshmen to research through a freshman seminar course, engaging undergraduates in her research activities, and incorporating research agendas into both undergraduate and graduate lectures and course projects. She will also partner with existing activities at Lamar -- including the McNair Scholars, INSPIRED, STAIRSTEP, and WIRED programs -- to help participants bridge to advanced studies, such as three one-day INSPIRED middle school summer computing academies in spring 2010 and one five-day INSPIRED summer computing academy in summer 2010. All these academies will be supported by INSPIRED and there is no charge for participants.

Liu also plans a summer computing institute with professional development workshops for teachers in next five years. The first workshop will be held in summer 2010. Each Teacher Summer Computing workshop will be a five-day workshop for computer science, science and math teachers from school districts in the areas surrounding Beaumont, especially districts with majority minority and economically challenged students.

Each year the workshops will have a different focus and teachers will be encouraged to supplement their courses using hands-on activities related to each year’s area of focus. The areas of interest include computer systems, robotics, computer animation, programming languages, the Internet and more.

Each teacher will be supported with $300 ($60/day) to participate in one workshop. For information on partnerships and applications, contact Liu at jliu@my.lamar.edu.

Liu received the Lamar University Merit Award in 2008.

-----

Source: Lamar 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

TACC's Ranger supercomputer celebrates its second year of enabling important research; Microsoft partners with NSF to bring cloud services to researchers; and NSF submits its fiscal year 2011 budget request. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

NASA Looks to Move Science Apps Into the Cloud

It seems only natural that the US space agency would be casting its eyes toward the clouds. Sure enough, NASA is now looking to cloud computing to optimize the operation of the agency's IT infrastructure for some of its science codes. Like many commercial businesses and government organizations, NASA is being asked to do more computing with fewer datacenter resources.
Read More...

Thoughts, Observations, Beliefs & Opinions About the NSF Supercomputer Centers

There is no such thing as an NSF (Supercomputer) Center and there never has been. There should be. What there are, in the words of Ed Hayes, then comptroller of NSF, are "NSF ASSISTED Supercomputer Centers." This is a double edged sword.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

IBM Releases Energy Efficient Power7 System

Feb 09 | eWeek Europe | Company says new high-end servers will deliver "intelligent performance." Read more...

Inductive Coupling Packs Flash Drive in a Chip

Feb 09 | EE Times | Wireless technology promises energy-efficient chip-to-chip communication. Read more...

IBM, Microsoft Help Create Montana Supercomputer

Feb 08 | eWeek | A new kind of Rocky Mountain high. Read more...

AMD Aims for GPUs in Mainstream Servers Starting 2012

Feb 08 | Computerworld | Chip maker hopes to bring CPU-GPU processors to servers in two years. Read more...

Graphene Transistors That Work at Blistering Speeds

Feb 05 | Technology Review | IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. 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.

Appro Assists LLNL with Cluster Designed for Extreme Scale Visualization

Jan 11 | | LLNL is home to some of the fastest computers in the world. In 2012, LLNL expects to have the Sequoia supercomputing cluster operational with a projected performance of over 20 PFLOP/s. These systems will focus on strengthening the foundations of predictive simulation through running large suites of complex simulations and then comparing model predictions with experimental data. To visualize this project’s large amount of data, LLNL requested an Appro Supercomputing Cluster specifically designed to support interactive data analysis.

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