Research projects

• Creating component-based software architectures for scientific computation, including an active collaboration with the Common Component Architecture (CCA) Forum, and developing the SCIJump distributed framework for parallel computation.
• Developing new algorithms and software for interactive ray tracing, for both scientific visualization and graphic applications.  The Manta interactive ray tracer embodies many of these ideas and is able to render many scenes at 15-30 frames per second or more, and scales to hundreds of CPUs.
  
• Creating software architectures for sophisticated multi-physics scientific simulations, as typified by the Uintah simulation environment that is employed by the Center for Simulation of Accidental Fires and Explosions (C-SAFE) to simulate the response of energetic devices subjected to transporation fuel fires.  These simulations combine simulations of fluid flow, chemical reactions and mechanical structures to predict the risks associated with these devices.  Uintah employs a non-traditional approach to achieving parallelism, and achieves flexibility and scalability by explicitly representing the structure of parallel computation.
• Creating Problem-Solving Environments (PSEs) that blur the boundaries between computation, analysis and visualization to provide efficient access to all of the tools necessary for scientific discovery.  I started the open source SCIRun PSE as a graduate student and am also involved with the Kepler workflow system through the SciDAC Scientific Data Management Center.
  

Honors, Awards and Responsibilities

• Board of Directors, Clark Planetarium
• Named one of HPCWire's People to Watch, 2006
  
• Director, Center for Interactive Ray Tracing and Photorealistic Visualization
• Co-organized the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing (RT06)
• Program committee for the 2007 Eurographics Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing (RT07)
  
• Best Paper Awards: RT06 (Design for Parallel Interactive Ray Tracing Systems) and Visualization '98 (Interactive Ray Tracing for Isosurface Rendering)
• Computer World Honors Medal 2003
• Computer World/Smithsonian Award, Finalist in the science category for SCIRun, 1998
• Computational Science Graduate Fellow (1994-1997)
• B.S. Electrical Engineering, University of Oklahoma 1992
• Ph.D. Computer Science, University of Utah 1999.  Advisor: Chris Johnson
  

Contact Information