Name:
Richard J. Perkins
School:
Louisiana State University
Major:
Computer Science
Minor:
Mathematics
Faculty Mentor:
Professor Bijaya B. Karki from Computer Science at LSU and Professor Renata Wentzcovitch, Department of Materials Science
presentation
final report
Project Title:
Further Development on Elasticity Visualization System
Project Description:
Richard has been working with VLab's interactive elasticity visualization system. This visualization displays crystals' elastic constants and wave velocities as a function of their pressure, temperature, and composition. His additions to the visualization system include a range of new usability features and graph types, including star plots, parallel plots, an-plots, and polygon-based surfaces that graphically represent wave velocities in three dimensions. He has also added many features, including zooming, axis manipulation, and the ability to remove data.
Name:
Anna E. Sallstrom
School:
Carleton College
Major:
Computer Science
Faculty Mentor:
Professor Renata Wentzcovitch, Department of Materials Science and Dr. Cesar R. S. da Silva
presentation
final report
Project Title:
Workflow Visualization
Project Description:
Anna is working on the development of a workflow visualization for inclusion in VLab's web portal. After learning about Swing and the visualization toolkit Prefuse, she improved VLab's existing WebStart visualization application by debugging and refactoring it. Then she researched converting it into a Java applet. Anna is currently writing a new, simplified visualization applet as a lightweight alternative.
Name:
Linzey A. Bachmeier
School:
University of Minnesota
Faculty Mentor:
Professor Ilja Siepmann, Chemistry Department
presentation
final report
Project Title:
Melting Points of Aluminum at Geological Pressures
Project Description:
Linzey studied aluminum's properties under the pressure conditions that are
present in the earth's crust. Her project evaluated the Mei Davenport Embedded-Atom (MDEA) potential energy function's accuracy in predicting the solid/liquid phase behavior of aluminum at geological pressures. To do this, she collected the Gibbs free energy difference between aluminum's liquid and solid phases using several different methods, including thermodynamic integration and multiple histogram reweighting (MHR).
Name:
Lorna C. Grauvilardell
School:
University of Minnesota
Major:
Chemical Engineering
Minor:
Mathematics
Faculty Mentor:
Professor Ilja Siepmann, Chemistry Department
presentation
final report
Project Title:
Hydrated Silica Systems at 250 Mpa
Project Description:
Lorna is simulating the behavior of hydrated silica systems at high enough to make laboratory experiments prohibitively difficult. She uses the Monte Carlo method to . Then she run simulations in an isobaric-isothermal ensemble and observe the density to which it converges, studying the effect of water in the silica system.
Name:
Javier Roman Sanchez
School:
University of Puerto Rico at Rio Peirdras
Major:
Computer Science; Applied Mathematics in Natural Science
Faculty Mentor:
Professor Renata Wentzcovitch, Department of Materials Science and Dr. Cesar R. S. da Silva
presentation
final report
Project Title:
Making Vlab Secure
Project Description:
Javier has been working on securing communication between VLab's web service infrastructure. Communication between web services must address the three goals of information security: authentication, confidentiality, and integrity. Javier has explored various web service protocols and how to securely transfer data over them. He consulted the OASIS security standards and investigated various methods of encryption. From his research, Javier made security recommendations to VLab based on the goals of the VLab project; he carefully weighed the consequences of security on risk and performance. Finally, Javier implemented a proof-of-concept application demonstrating web service security.
Name:
Martin D. Lyness
School:
University of Minnesota
Major:
Computer Science
Minor:
Business Management
Faculty Mentor:
Professor David A. Yuen, Department of Geology and Geophysics
presentation
final report
Project Title:
Remote Visualization: Explorations of Ajax and Web Services
Project Description:
Martin spent one month in China giving presentations on computational visualizations. He explained their importance and gave demonstrations of tools and techniques for making use of visualizations. Martin researched the Yahoo! Pipes filtering application and wrote a light-weight version that uses the Script.aculo.us and Prototype JavaScript frameworks. Martin also worked on developing a dynamic charge density visualization client that operates within the VLab portal. This client utilizes JavaScript and generates images with various levels of filtering, such as atom, contour, and volume displays.
Name:
Daniil Kigelman
School:
University of Minnesota
Major:
Computer Science
Faculty Mentor:
Professor Renata Wentzcovitch, Department of Materials Science and Dr. Cesar R. S. da Silva
presentation
final report
Project Title:
My Experience with Managing Chaos in a Large Project
Project Description:
This summer Dan continued his work with the VLab Portal, applying software engineering concepts that he has recently learned, including refactoring, testing, test-first development, and various Extreme Programming principles to a growing complexity of code. He produced two portlets to improve navigation on the VLab Portal, but most of his effort was spent to improve the quality of the code and the ease of development.
Name:
Samuel J. Handler
School:
Macalester College
Faculty Mentor:
Professor Yousef Saad, Department of Computer Science
presentation
final report
Project Title:
The Lanszos Algorithm for Large-Scale Eigenvalue Problems
Project Description:
Sam researched implementations of the Lanczos Algorithm to solve large-scale eigenvalue problems. Large-scale eigenvalue problems can be manageable by computations, but can be very time-consuming based on the algorithms used to solve for the eigenvalues. The Laczos Algorithm reduces a large, complicated eigenvalue problem into a smaller, simpler problem. Sam found that the most expensive calculation of the algorithm is reorthogonalization, and sought methods to reduce the impact of these calculations; he anticipates reducing the overhead and calculation time by running parallel computations and carefully managing vector storage.
Name:
Matthew Broten
School:
University of Minnesota
Major:
Computer Science
Faculty Mentor:
Professor David A. Yuen, Department of Geology and Geophysics
final report
Name:
Shuo Wang
School:
University of Minnesota
Major:
English
Minor:
Computer Science
Faculty Mentor:
Professor David A. Yuen, Department of Geology and Geophysics
presentation
final report
Project Title:
Development of a Ray Casting Application for the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture
Project Description:
Matthew and Shuo have been working on implementing a ray casting algorithm on a PlayStation 3. They implemented and enhanced Eric Rollins' open source "Real-Time Ray Tracing" application on a cell architecture. They will be working to increase the number of triangles they are able to render from 4,000 to the hundreds of thousands. They also built a wiki where they record steps in their development.
