ITHACA, N.Y. -- Fifteen undergraduate students from across the country arrived in Ithaca, N.Y., on June 2 to begin a summer of research at the Cornell Theory Center (CTC). The Supercomputing Program for Undergraduate Research (SPUR), in its seventh year, is offering students the opportunity to pursue a computational science research project at Cornell University. SPUR is funded by the National Science Foundation through its Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program.

Through a competitive process, these students were selected from colleges and universities across the nation to come to Cornell during the summer to work on a specific research project under the guidance of a Cornell faculty or staff member. CTC staff members are teaching the students how to use CTC's high-performance computing resources, and they are providing consulting assistance throughout the program.

"We're excited about working with these impressive students. In only nine weeks, they'll learn about high-performance computing -- including visualization and parallel processing -- make significant progress on their research projects, and give formal presentations on their work. And, if our past programs are an indicator, they'll discover that it can be fun too," said Robert Feldman, SPUR coordinator.

A number of previous SPUR participants have continued their research beyond the summer at CTC, and some have presented their results at professional meetings and submitted their findings to scholarly journals. This year's topics in physics include solar magnetoconvection, characterization of spatiotemporal chaos, and electrostatic properties of proteins. A chemistry student is investigating the generation mechanism for tsunamis, a mechanical engineering major is studying the performance of airfoils for transonic flight, and an applied math student is looking at mother-daughter mobility as a dynamic microsimulation model of American society.

A full list of the SPUR students, their universities, and their projects follows. More information about SPUR can be found at http://www.tc.cornell.edu/Edu/SPUR/ on the World Wide Web.

CTC is one of four high-performance computing and communications centers supported by the National Science Foundation. Activities of the center are also funded by New York State, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health, IBM, and other members of CTC's Corporate Partnership Program.

SPUR PARTICIPANTS:

Barry Byrd, Jr.

Illinois Institute of Technology

3D Simulation of Field-Reversed Ion Rings

John Chase

SUNY College at Brockport

Surface Evolution during Vapor Phase Deposition

Kyal Dalrymple

University of Colorado at Boulder

Fractal Fourier Series

Aaron Davis

University of Oklahoma

Application of Scalable Parallel Architectures to Computational Electromagnetics

Adam Fass

University at Buffalo, SUNY

3D Simulation of Field-Reversed Ion Rings

Mark Grondona

Humboldt State University

An Investigation of the Generation Mechanism for Tsunamis

Leigh-Ann Henderson

University of South Alabama

Multifaceted Modes of Coinage Metal Interactions with Acetylide

Mead Jordan

Hastings College

Optimizing Performance of a Domain Decomposed Monte Carlo Algorithm

Cynthia Rudin

University at Buffalo, SUNY

Dynamics of Solar Magnetoconvection

Christian Santangelo

Cornell University

Characterization of Spatiotemporal Chaos

Brigit Schroeder

Institute of Technology, University of Minnesota

Electrostatic Properties of Proteins

Andrew Schultz

University of Tulsa

Micelle Formation in Surfactant Solutions

Greta Soechting

Virginia Tech

Mother-Daughter Mobility: A Dynamic Microsimulation Model of American Society

Peter Woolf

Cornell University

Surface Evolution during Vapor Phase Deposition

Marie Yarisantos

SUNY Stony Brook

Performance of Airfoils for Transonic Flight