ITHACA, N.Y. -- Four research projects at Cornell University have been selected to receive a total of $1.1 million in Department of Defense (DoD) grants under the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program and the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP).

The research project leaders are Kenneth Birman, professor of computer science; Lang Tong, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering; Matthew Miller, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering; and Stephen Pope, the Sibley College Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

The awards are among 17 made to U.S. universities, averaging $1 million a year and totaling about $8.5 million in Þscal 2003 and up to $17 million per year starting in Þscal 2004. The institutions will receive the grants to conduct multidisciplinary research in 12 topic areas of basic science and engineering.

MURI awards provide funding for research, graduate students and laboratory instrumentation development that supports specific science and engineering research themes vital to national defense. DURIP is a program within MURI to provide funds for the acquisition of research equipment. The awards are the result of a rigorous merit competition over many months. Proposals were received from 83 researchers requesting $497 million for multidisciplinary research.

Birman's DURIP award was for $427,608 to provide hardware support for a five-year MURI grant of $4 million that began in July 2002. The DURIP grant will assist the computer science department in its work with the Information Assurance Institute (IAI), a joint Cornell-U.S. Air Force Research Laboratories (AFRL) effort. The laboratory is looking at ways of helping the Air Force deal with distributed computing on a massive scale. This area is sometimes called network centric warfare (NCW), and the Cornell researchers will be helping AFRL look at options for building new NCW software systems. The collaboration with the Air Force currently involves about 10 Cornell researchers, including Fred Schneider, professor of computer science, who directs the IAI, and Carla Gomes, computer science research associate, who directs the Intelligent Information Systems Institute, which is researching artificial intelligence issues.

Tong's DURIP award of $458,997 will support several existing DoD projects on wireless networks. The funding will cover work on an experimental system with a unified platform that offers the capability of laboratory testing of theoretical results and novel concepts for mobile wireless and sensor networks. Tong's colleagues on the project are assistant professors of electrical and computer engineering Rajit Manohar, Sergio Servetto and Anna Scaglione.

Miller and his Cornell co-principal investigator, Paul Dawson, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, will receive a one-year $126,357 MURI award to build an experimental facility they can use to load-test specimens while concurrently interrogating them with high-intensity X-rays at facilities like the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source. This system will support an ongoing Cornell program, funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, that focuses on developing what the researchers call Digital Material, a modeling framework that will accelerate the insertion of new materials.

The experiments support a computational effort focused on creating virtual specimens -- with microstructures identical to their physical counterparts -- that can be subject to thermomechanical loading. The researchers seek to create a modeling environment where new materials can be developed for specific performance-intensive applications.

Pope will receive a one-year MURI award of $102,904 for the purchase of a 24-node, 48-processor computing cluster for turbulence and combustion research. The computer system will be used for various research projects on modeling turbulent combustion, unsteady aerodynamic ßows, and direct and large-eddy simulations of turbulence. His co-principal investigators are Cornell professors of mechanical and aerospace engineering David Caughey and Lance Collins.