News Center

  • Dr. Satish Puri receives NSF Award

    Dr. Satish Puri has received a two-year, $174,998 award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). His research project is entitled “CRII: CSR: MPI-ACC-GIS: Accelerating Geo-Spatial Computations on HPC Platform”

    About the award and Dr. Puri's Project

    Dr. Satish Puri has received a two-year, $174,998 award from the National Science Foundation through the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Research Initiation Initiative (CRII). According to NSF, the goal of CRII is to "encourage research independence immediately upon obtaining one’s first academic position after receipt of the PhD." Dr. Puri’s project is entitled "CRII: CSR: MPI-ACC-GIS: Accelerating Geo-Spatial Computations on HPC Platform" and will investigate the use of high performance computing (HPC) to speedup data-intensive and compute-intensive operations in the domain of Geographic Information Systems.

    Project Abstract:

    Spatial computations are at the heart of topological and geometric analysis used in many science and engineering applications. Government agencies in public health, urban planning, transportation, scientific communities and private sector depend on spatial data mining and analysis to gain insights and produce actionable plans. However, with the increase in the size and complexity of spatial data, traditional desktop-based analysis is inadequate for the task, and there is a need to accelerate compute-intensive spatial applications on modern computers and supercomputers to get results in real-time.

    The first objective of this project is to develop practical parallel algorithms based on plane sweep for computational geometry problems. The second objective is to inject spatial data awareness into the existing Message Passing Interface (MPI)-based Geographic Information System (GIS). MPI-ACC-GIS software will enable efficient input/output and geometric computations on large spatial datasets stored on parallel filesystems, thus improving the state-of-the-art. The MPI-ACC-GIS software will enable existing sequential tools to be used in a high performance computing environment with thousands of cores. In addition, the project has a broader impact in training undergraduate and graduate students to perform research in high performance computing.

    NSF Awards Listing