Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Dave Toth, and his students Zach Goodywyn and Jerome Mueller published a paper on the research they conducted during this year’s UMW Summer Science Program. The paper compares the performance of the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor and an NVIDIA K20c GPU. Prof. Toth also presented the work at the PDCN conference in Austria last week.
Toth and Student Publish in Journal of Computational Science Education
Dave Toth, assistant professor of computer science, and Mike Crawford, a student in Toth’s parallel computing class last fall, published a paper in the Journal of Computational Science Education. The paper, “Parallelization of the Knapsack Problem as an Introductory Experience in Parallel Computing,” describes both Crawford’s and Toth’s experiences with and reflections about the eight-week course project. The project included each student in the course writing a parallel program and running it on one of the 50 fastest supercomputers in the world.
Dave Toth & Collaborators Win Grants
At the end of September, Assistant Professor of Computer Science Dave Toth and his colleagues from Merrimack College, Jimmy Franco (Chemistry) and Charlotte Berkes (Biology), were awarded two grants of supercomputing time to search for drugs to cure histoplasmosis and inhibit HIV. Their research team was awarded a total of 1,818,365 hours of compute time on the 40th fastest computer in the world, worth about $148,778. Toth will use the Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center to conduct virtual screens of millions of molecules to find the best leads. Franco and Berkes will then test the best leads in their labs to determine how effective they are and try to devise better molecules based on the structure of the most effective molecules. The granting entity, the NSF-funded organization known as the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), awards grants of compute time to scientists, engineers, social scientists, and humanists for computationally intensive research.