Research

 A key tenant of CITR's strategy for building a flourishing and sustainable ITR community at UT has been its investment in thriving research efforts. As a result and in order to keep UTK on the leading edge of high performance scientific computing, CITR directly supports the work of the Innovative Computing Lab (ICL), which serves as the foundation of CITR's research initiatives. In addition, CITR's leadership has resulted in a strong record of local research collaborations, e.g., UTK/ORNL, DOE SciDAC projects and the NCCS Center. New research collaborations in 2008 included the NSF-funded National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) and the $16M National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS). CITR also contributed to two large ($3M) NSF educational program awards in 2008 - Sustainable Technology through Advanced Interdisciplinary Research (STAIR) and Scalable Computing and Leading Edge Innovative Technologies (SCALE-IT). CITR director Dongarra is a co-PI on the SCALE-IT effort.

 Experience shows that once a research program grows beyond a certain level of funding and activity, sustaining that success and spurring further growth requires both a) additional research leaders to help broaden and diversify the lines of inquiry and b) organizational investment to help manage the collateral activities (e.g., project and proposal development, grant and contract management) that are inevitable concomitants of such high levels of success. CITR's investment in ITR has been expressly designed to address these general facts of research life. Currently, CITR's efforts focus on the Innovative Computing Laboratory.

Innovative Computing Laboratory
http://icl.cs.utk.edu/

  Led by Dr. Jack Dongarra, the Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL) has been at the forefront of research in high performance and distributed computing for nearly two decades. The progress of scientific inquiry now depends on advances in scientific computing, where ICL continues to pioneer.

For more information about ICL, visit the website or download a copy of the 2008/2009 ICL Report.

Over the past eight years, CITR has also provided support for two additional research labs on the Knoxville campus that have been instrumental in combining IT and computational-driven solutions to scientific problems. The two additional labs that have received support from CITR are as follows:

Logistical Computing and Internetworking Laboratory
http://loci.cs.utk.edu/

  The Logistical Computing and Internetworking Laboratory (LoCI), directed by Dr. Micah Beck, is devoted to leading edge research in Information Logistics, a new branch of Distributed Computing that studies the flexible co-scheduling of the fundamental physical resources that underpin all computer systems.

Institute of Environmental Modeling
http://www.tiem.utk.edu/

  The Institute of Environmental Modeling (TIEM), under the leadership of Dr. Louis J. Gross, performs basic research in significant environmental problems with important regional, national, and international impact.