That savings comes from everyone doing their part to eliminate wasted energy — that means turning off lights when a room is empty, shutting off computers at the end of the day, using a power strip and unplugging it at night and other simple energy-saving steps.

Thanks to help from all members of the campus community, our electricity usage per square foot on campus is down nearly 10 percent in that time frame. That reduced usage doesn’t just affect energy costs, but it also has a positive effect on the environment. Less power means less pollution created as a result of power plants.

Another key to the success of Switch Your Thinking is the campus energy conservation policy, which went into effect last year around this time. The policy formalizes a number of energy-saving efforts that were already taking place on campus and makes them consistent and easy to follow.

One major part of the policy is the establishment of target indoor air temperatures in campus buildings. In the heating season, the target temperature is 68 degrees Fahrenheit, while in the cooling season, it’s 76. With colder weather arriving, it’s a good time to remember ways to beat the cooler temperatures. On chilly days, dress in layers appropriate to the temperature, or keep a sweater or jacket at your desk. If your work area has windows, open your blinds when the sun is out and soak up some solar heat.

If you feel your work area is outside the established temperature range, contact Facilities Services at 974-5346. For both safety and energy conservation reasons, employees are not permitted to use personal space heaters in their work area. Not only do they present a fire hazard, but they are massive energy hogs. In fact, just one personal space heater uses as much energy as a chandelier with 25 60-watt light bulbs!

Facilities Services is dedicated to making sure campus resources operate as efficiently as possible while maintaining the comfort of students, faculty and staff. They will be happy to measure the temperature in your work space, and will ensure that it meets the minimum standards laid out in the conservation policy. Facilities staff also can conduct an energy audit if you have concerns about energy waste in your work space. In extreme circumstances, a Facilities Services-approved heater may be provided.

In the coming months, more energy upgrades are planned for campus, including the addition of more automatic light switches, energy efficient bulbs and upgrades to other infrastructure. Even with those upgrades, the success of Switch Your Thinking rests with people around campus continuing to take the simple steps necessary to reduce energy consumption.

For more information on UT Knoxville’s energy conservation policy, visit the Make Orange Green Web site.

Leading University and Research Institution Joins Network of Seven Other Institutions Focused on Parallel Computing

SANTA CLARA, Calif. —  NVIDIA Corp. has recognized the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL) as a CUDA Center of Excellence, noting its adoption of the CUDA programming model in its curriculum, as well as its pioneering research into the development of linear algebra libraries for the high-performance computing community.

UT Knoxville joins a select group of seven universities and research organizations in the U.S. and abroad, including Harvard University, Cambridge University and National Taiwan University, that are designated as a CUDA Center of Excellence. More than 200 universities worldwide teach the CUDA programming model within their curriculum.

CUDA is NVIDIA’s computing architecture that enables its GPUs to be programmed using industry standard programming languages and APIs, opening up their massive parallel processing power to a broad range of applications beyond graphics.

“This award of a CUDA Center of Excellence underscores ICL’s commitment to continue our work at the forefront of high performance, scientific computing, ” said Jack Dongarra, ICL’s director. “We are very proud of this award and excited by the opportunity it affords to pursue our research on NVIDIA’s ground breaking platform.”

Mathematical algorithms are an essential component used by computers to perform linear algebra computations, and ICL’s years of experience in developing open source, mathematical software packages and systems such as LAPACK, ScaLAPACK, ATLAS, and PLASMA will be extended by the establishment of this new center. In particular, ICL’s work on Matrix Algebra for GPU and Multicore Architectures (MAGMA), whose goal is to create a new generation of linear algebra libraries that dramatically cut processing times using hybrid GPU-CPU co-processing systems, will be an area of focus.

“NVIDIA technologies are now well established in the forefront of general purpose, parallel computing. Our work on the development of Linear Algebra Libraries for CUDA-based Hybrid Architectures will further enable and expand these technologies in the general area of high-performance scientific computing. MAGMA, a subset of LAPACK for CUDA-based Hybrid Architectures, is only a first step in this direction,” added Dongarra.

The potential size of the communities impacted by the success of this new CUDA Center of Excellence is significant. A partial listing of the peta-scale ready applications that rely on dense and sparse linear algebra that the MAGMA libraries will encode includes: quantum chemistry, multi-physics supernova simulation, nano-materials, geophysics, computational mechanics, electronic structure of matter and fluid dynamics.

Visit the CUDA Center of Excellence program pages for more information.

About the Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL)

The Innovative Computing Laboratory, part of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department in UTK’s College of Engineering, is an academic world leader in enabling technology research for scientific computing. With a focus on development of numerical libraries that encode the use of linear algebra in software, tools for performance analysis and benchmarking, and tools for high performance, distributing computing, ICL is located at the heart of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, campus and has been part of the HPC community since 1989. For more information about ICL, visit http:/icl.eecs.utk.edu.

About NVIDIA

NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) awakened the world to the power of computer graphics when it invented the graphics processing unit (GPU) in 1999. Since then, it has consistently set new standards in visual computing with breathtaking, interactive graphics available on devices ranging from portable media players to notebooks to workstations. NVIDIA’s expertise in programmable GPUs has led to breakthroughs in parallel processing which make supercomputing inexpensive and widely accessible. Fortune magazine has ranked NVIDIA #1 in innovation in the semiconductor industry for two years in a row. For more information, see http://www.nvidia.com.

Contact:

Jack Dongarra, Innovative Computing Laboratory, (865) 974-8295, dongarra@eecs.utk.edu

]]> http://www.utk.edu/tntoday/2009/11/19/ut-bookstore-thanksgiving-sale/feed/ 0 http://www.utk.edu/tntoday/2009/11/19/holiday-musicale/ http://www.utk.edu/tntoday/2009/11/19/holiday-musicale/#comments Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:17:35 +0000 khintz http://www.utk.edu/tntoday/?p=17127

KNOXVILLE — The School of Music at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is holding a benefit concert to raise money for the program’s scholarship funds.

The Holiday Musicale will be held at the Foundry at the World’s Fair Park from 4 to 6 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 6, 2009. It will feature a wide variety of music performed by students and faculty of the School of Music, along with holiday food and drink.

“This event is a wonderful way to support our scholarship program, which is important to many of our students,” said Roger Stephens, director of the School of Music. “Without these scholarships, many high-potential young musicians would simply not be able to benefit from being a part of our music program.”

The evening will feature music of the season. Music will be provided by the Jazz Quintet, the Smoky Mountain Brass Quintet, the Flute Choir, and the UT Faculty String Quartet.

Hors d’oeuvres and wine will be served. A cash bar also will be available.

The Holiday Musicale is sponsored by Sheena McCall, a wealth management advisor at Merrill Lynch.

Reservations for the Holiday Musicale are required by Tuesday, Dec. 1. The suggested donation is $60 per person. Additional scholarship donations also will be accepted. The School of Music accepts cash, checks, Visa, MasterCard or Discover.

C O N T A C T :

Donna Hundley, (865-974-8935, dhundley@utk.edu)

Developed under the leadership of Indiana University, FutureGrid is one of only two experimental systems in the NSF Track 2 program that funds the most powerful, next-generation scientific supercomputers in the nation.

FutureGrid is a high performance grid test bed that will allow scientists to work collaboratively to develop and test novel approaches to parallel, grid, and cloud computing. These types of computing have become essential to such lifesaving work as medical and life science modeling and drug discovery, as well as to disciplines ranging from physics and environmental science to economic modeling and forecasting.

“FutureGrid will serve as a proving ground for new distributed computing systems and will open up exciting new avenues for scientific, commercial, and governmental collaboration and research,” said Principal Investigator Geoffrey C. Fox, director of the Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) Digital Science Center and a professor in the IU School of Informatics and Computing at Bloomington. “We envision the grids and clouds of the future not as a single system, but as many linked systems. For this reason we are engaging an incredible set of academic and industry partners throughout the U.S. and in Europe to participate in FutureGrid.”

Cloud technologies — such as Amazon Web Services and the open-source Eucalyptus system — are increasingly used to support online resources used by researchers and the public, and have the potential to make a significant impact on the 21st century economy. The U.S. federal government is also exploring the use of cloud technologies to better serve the public — including the proposed development of a federal computing cloud — and government officials are working with industry partners to establish standards for cloud computing.

“Our participation in FutureGrid will give us a remarkable opportunity to contribute to the evolution of the leading edge computing technology that scientists and engineers need to accelerate their research,” said Jack Dongarra, University Distinguished Professor and Director of UT Knoxville’s Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL). “We are exceptionally pleased to be part of the outstanding team of collaborators that Prof. Fox has assembled; it brings together some of today’s most creative leaders in the field of high performance distributed computing.”

Other partners in the FutureGrid project include: Purdue University, San Diego Supercomputer Center at University of California San Diego, University of Chicago/Argonne National Labs, University of Florida, University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, University of Texas at Austin/Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Virginia, and the Center for Information Services and GWT-TUD from Technische Universitat Dresden.

The FutureGrid test bed will be composed of a high-speed network connected to distributed clusters of high performance computers and will be linked to the TeraGrid—the NSF’s national cyberinfrastructure of high performance computing resources for scientific research. FutureGrid enables systematic reproducible development, testing, and benchmarking of software systems and application codes, which will be the focus of Dr. Dongarra and his ICL team. It will go one important step further than other grids, however, using virtualization technology that will allow the test bed to support a wide range of operating systems.

FutureGrid allows researchers to experiment at all levels, including customizing network protocols and experimenting with new middleware. By using virtual machines running on real hardware, Future Grid will allow scientists to have full control over their testing environments without interfering with other users. Each virtual environment will consists of exactly the software that the scientists needs for an experiment and no more, reducing the amount of complexity found in current systems and allowing computer scientists to do controlled and reproducible experiments. This approach will create a safer, more secure and efficient means to explore emerging approaches to computing and data analysis.

Scientists will have the ability to pursue research interactively and to collaborate internationally, creating unprecedented potential for scientific discovery and innovation as they explore new uses for cloud technologies in science and engineering. FutureGrid will also be available to students at numerous universities in order to encourage collaboration and familiarize the next generation of knowledge workers with these technologies.

About Innovative Computing Laboratory

The Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL) is a global leader in research and development of enabling technologies and software infrastructure for scientific computing. ICL researchers provide high performance tools for tackling some of today’s most challenging science and engineering problems, and they play a major role in the development of standards for scientific computing generally. As part of the electrical engineering and computer science department at UT Knoxville, ICL is the flagship laboratory of the Center for Information Technology Research (CITR), one of UT Knoxville’s leading centers of excellence.

Tickets are $59 for lower level seats and $41 for upper level and are on sale now. To receive the special UT employee discount, call (865) 250-3842 or email KnoxGroups@aol.com. Be sure to specify that you are an employee to receive the discount.

For more information about The Radio City Christmas Spectacular featuring the Rockettes, visti http://www.radiocitychristmas.com/nationaltour/.

Stefanie Ohnesorg

Stefanie Ohnesorg, associate professor of German at UT Knoxville, has received the Tennessee Foreign Language Teaching Association’s 2009 Jacqueline Elliott Award for Teaching and Service in Higher Education, the award that recognizes Tennessee’s postsecondary foreign language teacher of the year. Ohnesorg was recognized at the annual meeting of the Association in Nashville on November 13-14.

Ohnesorg was cited for her outstanding commitment to foreign language teaching at all levels and across different cultures, including her leadership in founding and directing the German Saturday School.

Having earned undergraduate degrees in literature and geography in her native Germany, Ohnesorg did her graduate work in Montreal, where she taught German language and culture courses in both English and French while earning her doctorate at McGill University. When she joined the faculty of UT Knoxville in 1995, she became the founding force behind the German immersion weekend for UT students. Ohnesorg is well known as a classroom teacher who combines deep knowledge with energy, creativity and enthusiasm. As a professor and current coordinator of German instruction, she also trains German teachers, and chairs or serves on a number of graduate degree committees.

Ohnesorg has been recognized at UT Knoxville for her pioneering work in academic outreach to the community. Perhaps her most famous service is her role as founder and principal of the German Saturday School, an opportunity for children and adults to receive expert instruction in German. Now in its sixth year, the German Saturday School was designated this spring as a Partnerschaft-Schule by Germany’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, one of only forty-three schools in the United States that is accredited to award the Deutsches Sprachdiplom.

In the words of the award citation: “As a teacher who combines mastery of her subject with care for her students, who trains other teachers to the same high ideals, and who brings the joy of studying foreign language and culture to the community far beyond the walls of the university, Stefanie Ohnesorg is a model of teaching and service and a most worthy recipient of the Jacqueline Elliott Award.”

Joe Majdalani, a professor at UTSI, worked with Tony Saad, a doctoral student at the institute, on the research, which is published as a review in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, a highly prestigious journal. Theirs is only the second such review article by Tennessee-based researchers published in the journal’s more than 300-year history.

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Their work began with an examination of how the explosive reaction that powers rockets fueled by solid materials affects the forces inside the motor. It’s a problem that has vexed scientists since the early days of rocketry – the acoustic forces created by the reaction are so powerful that they influence the way energy flows out of the rocket. That energy is what propels the rocket skyward, so controlling that flow is key to making stronger, faster rockets.

What Saad and Majdalani did not expect, though, was that the mathematical underpinnings of their work would lead to an expansion of a theory that has existed since 1856. The theory, developed by famed scientist Lord Kelvin, had never been applied to fluid dynamics, which was the type of analysis the UTSI researchers were using.

In looking at the problem of energy in the rockets, scientists had observed that there was a breaking point of sorts where the energy changed from rotational to irrotational – think of a traditional “on-off” light switch. The UTSI team found, however, that instead of an on-off switch, the change looked more like a dimmer switch, with the energy change happening gradually along a curve instead of instantly.

While that information was interesting, it was the fact that it showed Kelvin’s theory could apply to fluid dynamics that served as the real attraction to reviewers at the journal. Majdalani says being published in the journal is a high honor.

“It’s neat to know we’ve published in what some might call the ‘Bible of science,’” he said. “This is the same journal where the work of scientists like Newton were shared with the world, and that means a lot.”

Majdalani and Saad, who will finish his doctorate this semester, plan to continue their work in hopes of better understanding the multitude of forces involved in rocket motors, with an eye toward even more discoveries down the line.

The article can be found online.

Tanisha Jenkins

Tanisha Jenkins, associate director in UT’s Office of Minority Student Affairs, was honored in Nashville last week at the Southern Association for College Student Affairs’ 60th Annual Awards and Celebration Dinner. Jenkins was named the 2009 recipient of the Bobby E. Leach Award, which recognizes a student affairs professional or graduate student for significant contributions to the development of multicultural relations on a college or university campus.

The award honors Jenkins’ service in professional and paraprofessional positions in Student Affairs that promote and cultivate multicultural relations on several campuses. Jenkins oversees a variety of programs that specifically impact the retention and academic performance of African American students, and provides guidance to a variety of multicultural student organizations. Jenkins’ many accomplishments include implementing the Women of Color Sisterhood Retreat, developing a Multicultural Faculty/Staff Network and receiving the Division of Student Affairs Program of the Year Award for the SafeZone program.

A native of Clinton, S.C., Jenkins came to UT from Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C., where she has served as the director of Multicultural Affairs and the Multicultural Center for five years. She holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Presbyterian College in Clinton, S.C., and a master’s degree in counselor education with a concentration in higher education administration from Clemson University in Clemson, S.C.

Phillip Fulmer Way Detour

Starting Monday, Nov. 23, Phillip Fulmer Way will be closed from Peyton Manning Pass to the KAT transit center at Andy Holt Avenue. The closing comes as work crews prepare for the next phase of renovation and new construction to Neyland Stadium.

Peyton Manning Pass will remain open during this construction phase but vehicular traffic going east on Peyton Manning will not be allowed to turn left onto Phillip Fulmer Way. The road will open by mid-August 2010.

For more info call 974-3061.