 |
 |
Dear Colleagues, I hope this announcement finds you well after a restful summer and energized for the following semesters!!! On Thursday September 3rd, 2015 from 3:40 - 5 p.m. in room 301 of Burchfiel Geography Building we will have our first Speaker of the Geography Colloquium Series Dr. Anthony Mezzacappa, the Newton W. and Wilma C. Thomas Chair of Theoretical and Computational Astrophysics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the Director of the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, joint between the University of Tennessee and its UT-Battelle partner universities and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. [cid:EB0DF604-DC42-4E5C-A7A6-B4E5D3884784] I have attached Dr. Mezzacappa's Bio and his talk is titled: The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences: The Skinny Abstract: The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS) was first established in 1991 and has been through several critical phases in the more than two decades since, including the award by DOE to UT-Battelle of the management of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the award by NSF to the University of Tennessee (UT) of the Kraken supercomputer, which was the Nation's first academic petaflop supercomputer, and the award by NSF to the University of Illinois of the eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), of which JICS is a leading partner, to support NSF's National cyberinfrastructure. As a result, JICS and, within it, the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), one of NSF's five supercomputing centers, took on a National focus, supporting thousands of users and projects across all scientific and engineering domains. Within the past two years, we have focused on bringing JICS expertise and resources, and its overall unparalleled NSF track record of user support, to campus. During this time, we have established a significant number of new, single- and multiple-investigator collaborations with campus faculty. Our desire is to continue this growth and, most important, bring the best of what the University has to offer in computing to its faculty and the research frontiers they wish to advance. I will give an overview of JICS, focusing on its unique aspects, particularly as they pertain to their potential utility to campus faculty and the opportunities they may afford faculty. I will discuss some of our ongoing collaborations with campus, and discuss ways we can, and hope to, engage other faculty in the future. Prior to his talk, we will have a Pizza brown bag Graduate Meeting with Dr. Mezzacappa from 1 - 2 pm that as Dr. Nagle and I will tell you both Human and Physical Geographers will want to attend. From 2 - 3 p.m. we have scheduled Dr. Mezzacappa's chat with Faculty who will want to attend for the same reasons. From 3:20 pm or so there will be a small reception with coffee/tea and snacks arranged by the new GARG coordinator TBA later today after the GARG meeting. Depending on graduate student attendance of the pizza/brown bag meet and greet we hope to continue this tradition with our next speaker: Dr. Benjamin Preston, Deputy Director ORNL Climate Change Institute: Reflexive Climate Risk Management on September 10, 2015. Here is BP in his younger days: [cid:F507A769-1060-435E-95F6-0E487F221505] Stay well (Sala Khantle in Sesotho) and Kindest regards, [cid:87102695-F1FB-4536-8258-47C2DB2C6FAC] Robert A. Washington-Allen 1. Assistant Professor of Geography 2. Environmental Tomography Laboratory Department of Geography University of Tennessee 304 Burchfiel Geography Building 1000 Phillip Fulmer Way Knoxville, TN 37996-0925 Cell: 979-571-4330 e-mail: washingtonra@<mailto:[log in to unmask]>utk.edu<http://utk.edu/> website: http://geography.utk.edu/about-us/faculty/dr-robert-washington-allen/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- "God has chosen the world that is the most perfect,that is to say, the one that is at the same time the simplest in hypotheses and the richest in phenomena." - Leibniz "I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people." --- Isaac Newton -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- To review the archives of CLUBGGY or Join/Leave the list go to: http://listserv.utk.edu/archives/clubggy.html