ICASE BECOMES CRPC AFFILIATED SITE

The Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (ICASE) has recently been named a CRPC-affiliated site. Operated at the NASA Langley Research Center by the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), ICASE provides an academic setting within which academic and industrial scientists can collaborate with NASA scientists and engineers on problems of mutual interest.

According to CRPC Director Ken Kennedy, the affiliation will greatly benefit both institutions by giving each access to the methods and research used by the other. "This affiliation will allow CRPC to have better access to problems arising from NASA applications, while bringing CRPC technologies to bear on those problems," says Kennedy. "I am particularly excited by the strategic collaboration in the area of Multidisciplinary Design Optimization, where CRPC and ICASE/NASA Langley are world leaders."

Led by M. Yousuff Hussaini, director of ICASE, the affiliation will promote collaborations for researchers in two major areas: Fortran Parallel Programming Systems, and Optimization and Automatic Differentiation. For the Fortran project, the key collaborators at ICASE are research fellow Piyush Mehrotra and senior staff scientist Dimitri Mavriplis. Mehrotra has been a contributor to CRPC's highly visible High Performance Fortran Forum, and has worked on language design and compiler development for Kali and Vienna Fortran, two data-parallel languages that have influenced HPF and Fortran D.

Mavriplis is an applied mathematician working on numerical methods using unstructured grids, an area previously used to drive compiler development. The inspector-executor paradigm for irregular computations came directly out of collaborations between computer scientists and mathematicians at ICASE. The CRPC plans to incorporate Mavriplis' insights into future compiler methods, and use his codes as test cases for new developments.

For the Optimization project, key ICASE collaborators are Michael Lewis, Virginia Torczon, and Natalia Alexandrov. Lewis is based at ICASE as a researcher. Torczon is a faculty member at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, and will consult with ICASE on a regular basis. Alexandrov works in the Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Branch at NASA Langley. All three members are long-time collaborators with John Dennis, leader of the CRPC optimization effort.

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