CAREER project Engineering professor Mark Paul says he plans to use System X supercomputer to build a better understanding of complex systems and develop hands-on numerical experiments that will enable pre-college students to explore chaotic dynamics for themselves.

Scott D. King, professor of geosciences in Virginia Tech's College of Science, has created numerical simulations of the three-dimensional nature of convection within Mercury's silicate mantle. The computations were done using the Virginia Tech geoscience department's High-Performance Earth Simulation System (HESS), a high-speed, high-capacity 768-core Dell computing cluster maintained by VT-ARC.

Ali R. Butt, an assistant professor of computer science in Virginia Tech's College of Engineering, has received a $400,000 Faculty Early Career Development Award, which is the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award for creative junior faculty who are considered to be future leaders in their academic fields.

Computational science specialist John Burkardt was awarded a research grant from Sandia National Laboratories for "Investigation and implementation of sparse grids" for the 2008 calendar year. For the grant, John will be collaborating with Clayton Webster, who received this year's prestigious John von Neumann fellowship at Sandia. The grant will enable them to extend John's sparse grid programs so that they can tackle the stochastic problems that Clayton has been analyzing for some time.

A team of researchers led by Pavan Balaji of Argonne National Laboratory and Wu Feng of Virginia Tech won an international competition for the most effective approach in using large-scale storage for high-performance computing. The award was presented Nov. 15 at SC|07, the world's premier conference on high-performance computing and networking.

Over the past year, the issue of power efficiency has become particularly important in light of recent reports that spending on power and cooling is fast approaching, if not exceeding, new server spending in datacenter environments.