Scientific Computing and Numerical Analysis Research

in the

Department of Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin


[ News ] [ Overview ] [ Faculty ] [ Graduate Students ] [ Postdoctoral Students and Visitors ] [ Related Research, Groups, and Programs ]


Overview

Scientific computing related research in the Department of Computer Sciences of The University of Texas at Austin spans a broad spectrum of topics. These include numerical analysis, high-performance computing, the software engineering of libraries, parallel and grid computing, languages, compilers, graphics, visualization. Some of the research is in collaboration with the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and the Texas Advanced Computing Center.


News


Faculty

Chandrajit Bajaj
holds the Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAM) Chair in Visualization. His is the director of the Center for Computational Visualization. is interests span the areas of Computer Graphics, Computational Mathematics, Geometric Design, and Data Visualization.

James C. Browne
holds the Regents Chair in Computer Science. His interests span almost all areas of computer science. More recently, he has pursued research in Computational Science, Parallel Computing, and Grid Computing. Prof. Browne holds joint appointments in the departments of Computer Sciences, Physics, and Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Alan Cline
holds the David Bruton, Jr. Professorship in Computer Sciences and is also Professor of Mathematics. He constructed FITPACK, a large package of curve and surface fitting subprograms that employed tension splines. His interests in fitting extend to the related areas of approximation theory, grid construction, and computational geometry. He has done research in numerical linear algebra - especially condition number estimation and the theory and use of the singular value decomposition. More recently he has considered the automatic detection of instability in scientific software.

Inderjit Dhillon
pursues research in computational linear algebra, data mining and bioinformatics. His emphasis is on exploring core problems in these areas to obtain novel algorithms that preserve the underlying problem structure. Some of these problems include clustering of high-dimensional data, low-dimensional approximations that preserve sparsity and non-negativity, and fast algorithms for eigenvalue problems.

David Kincaid
is interested in research focusing on the development and implemenentation of numerical algorithms and software for high-performance parallel computers. Of concern are iterative algorithms for solving systems of linear algebraic equations with large sparse coefficient matrices. Such systems arise in various numerical applications involving the solution of partial differential equations. He has been involved in the development of software such as the ITPACK packages and NSPCG - Nonsymmetric Precondition Conjugate Gradient. Also, he was one of the original developers of the Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS). He is the author research papers and textbooks on Numerical Methods and Computing and Numerical Analysis: Mathematics of Scientific Computing. Currently, he is the Interim Director of the Center for Numerical Analysis.

William Mark
is interested in algorithms, hardware architectures, and programming environments for 3D graphics systems and general-purpose single-chip parallel computers. For scientific computation problems, these future single-chip parallel computers hold the promise of much higher performance, but realizing this high performance will likely require significant changes to scientific computation techniques.

Robert van de Geijn
is currently interested in the software engineering aspects of high-performance sequential and parallel linear algebra libraries. Current projects include


Graduate Students

(incomplete list)


Postdoctoral Students and Visitors

(incomplete list)


Related Research, Groups, and Programs

The following faculty pursue research in the area of compilers and languages in support of scientific computing.
Calvin Lin
...

Kathryn McKinley
Kathryn McKinley's primary research goal is to enable programmers to express their applications in high level languages, and to develop advanced compiler techniques that enable them to achieve high performance. She is particularly interested in improving data locality, and is current pursuing hardware/software cooperative caching and prefetching to close the memory gap for scientific and general purpose applications.

The Automatic Theorem Proving Group in the department has a very active research project related to the formal verification of floating point units. Faculty involved include


Scientific computing at The University of Texas at Austin is pursued by various research groups in engineering and the physical sciences, including
Last Updated: March 17, 2003
rvdg@cs.utexas.edu