Center for Computational Research
Russ Miller
Director, Center for Computational Research
UB Distinguished Professor, Computer Science & Engineering
Senior Research Scientist, Hauptman-Woodward Medical Inst

CCR Overview
Supercomputing Center
High-Performance Computing (9TF; 250TB)
gapcon.com: 6th Worldwide; #1 Academia
High-End Visualization
$42M New Grants; $46M Vendor Support
Support ~100 Groups in ~25 Depts + 12 Industry
Bioinformatics Center
$61M NYS; $3M Feds; $53M New Grants;
$3.5 Foundation; $135M Corporate
Education/Outreach/Training
H.S. Summer Program
Hosts Meetings/Provides Tours
Work with Local Industry & Local Colleges
Wide-Variety of Degree Programs

"Dell Linux Cluster"
Dell Linux Cluster
5.8TF Peak; 4036 Processors (PIII 1.2GHz + P4 2.4GHz)
2TB RAM; 160TB Disk
16TB RAID
Dell Linux Cluster
2.9TF Peak; 304 Processors  (P4 2.4GHz)
Myrinet2000
600GB RAM; 40TB Disk
HP/Compaq SAN (Oct, 2002)
25TB Disk
250TB Tape
HP/Compaq 1TF EV7 Alpha System (3/03)

CCR Visualization
Fakespace ImmersaDesk
SGI 3300W
Portable Systems
Access Grid Node
Tiled Display Wall
Onyx2 / Onyx300

Sample CCR-Supported Research
Groundwater Modeling
Predict contaminant flow in groundwater & possible migration into streams and lakes.
Geophysical Mass Flows
Study of geophysical mass flows for risk assessment of lava flows and mudslides.
Astrophysics
Determine whether interacting astrophysical jets in dense star environments can generate turbulence in surrounding medium
Bioinformatics
Protein Folding (Computer simulations determine the 3D structure of proteins.)
Pharmacology
Computational Chemistry
Algorithm Development & Simulations
Fluid Dynamics
Modeling turbulent flows and combustion to improve design of chemical reactors, turbine engines, and airplanes.

Groundwater Modeling
Current work is based on Analytic Element Method
Key features:
High precision
Highly parallel
Object-oriented programming
Intelligent user interface
GIS facilitates large-scale regional applications
Utilized 10,661 CPU days (32 CPU years) of computing in past year on CCR’s commodity clusters

Computational Geophysical Mass Flows

Risk Mitigation
Integrate information from several sources
Simulation results
Remote sensing
GIS data
Develop realistic 3D models of geophysical mass flows
Present information at user appropriate resolutions

Molecular Structure Determination
SnB Software by UB/HWI
“Top Algorithms of the Century”
Critical to Rational Drug Design
Important Link in Structural Biology
Current Effort
Grid
Collaboratory
Intelligent Learning

Protein Folding
Ability of proteins to perform biological function is attributed to their 3-D structure.
Protein folding problem refers to the challenge of predicting 3-D structure from amino-acid sequence.
Solving the protein folding problem will impact drug design.

Children’s Hospital CT
3D Reconstruction of CT Dataset
Created with the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) on a Linux Workstation
3D Isosurface Clearly Shows Structure that is Nearly Impossible to Determine from 2D Slices

Academic Programs
Master’s Program in Bioinformatics (Sloan)
Advanced Degrees under development
Pharmacometrics, Biophotonics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Biology
School of Informatics (AT&T curr. dev.)
UB-HWI Dept. of Structural Biology
Complementary Degrees
Canisius College and Niagara University

Contact Information
miller@buffalo.edu
www.ccr.buffalo.edu
www.bioinformatics.buffalo.edu