2004 News

  • Dr. Mark F. Adams shared the 2004 Gordon Bell Prize in the category of special achievement for his parallel multigrid work on modeling the mechanics of trabecular bone, together with three biomedical engineers at the University of California-Berkeley. Dr. Adams' algebraic multigrid software library, Prometheus, is layered over a more basic solver library, PETSc, that is being developed under a five-year Department of Energy project led by Columbia. The computation recognized for the prize (awarded at the annual Supercomputing conference, held in Pittsburgh, November 6–12, 2004) ran on over 4000 processors, at 0.5 TeraFLOPS, on the ASCI White computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Mark is currently applying his skills to simulating gyrokinetic turbulence in tokamak reactors, jointly with the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. (Nov 6, 2004)

  • Richard Katz, a graduate student in the Departments of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, was written up in the DOE publication DEIXIS for his work on simulating subduction zones, where the ocean floor is deflected below the continental plates. Katz uses the software library PETSc for his cluster-based simulations, but his research also involves contributing a new software module to PETSc, to handle Lagrangian derivatives, which are fundamental in many geophysical models. Katz, a fifth-year student, is one of Columbia's three DOE CSGF fellows. Etay Ziv, an M.D.-Ph.D. candidate studying computational biology in APAM, began one of the prestigious four-year fellowships last year (fewer than 20 awards out of several hundred applications). (November, 2004)

  • Professor Gerald Navratil delivered one of five invited review lectures at the annual meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics of the APS (Savannah, November 15–19), the world's largest meeting of plasma physicists. Professor Navratil's review, entitled "Control of External Kink Instability," presented the culmination of more than 10 year's of research that has succeeded to control the most dangerous instabilities of high-pressure magnetic fusion devices using combinations of external conductors, plasma flow, and active feedback. Sustained high-pressure plasma discharges have been demonstrated by research teams lead by Professor Navratil and include research conducted at Columbia University's HBT-EP tokamak and the world's largest tokamak experiments in Europe and Japan. (Nov. 16, 2004)

  • Dr. Benjamin Levitt, who received his Ph.D. in May, was invited to speak on the "Observation of Centrifugally Driven Interchange Instabilities in a Laboratory Magnetic Dipole" at the APS-DPP Meeting last week in Savannah. While a graduate student, Ben induced near-sonic flows in a high-temperature dipole-confined plasma and excited centrifugally-driven interchange instabilities for the first time in the laboratory. He was able to precisely measure the structure of the electrostatic fields, make detail comparisons between observations and nonlinear simulations, and investigate the effects of energetic particles. Centrifugally-driven interchange modes are thought to be the cause of the "planetary wind" emanating from Jupiter's moon Io. (Nov. 16, 2004)

  • Columbia's Non-Neutral Torus (CNT) started operation. On Friday Nov. 12, 2004, after the CNT students and project leader, Professor Thomas Pedersen, completed final assembly, the Columbia Non-neutral Torus successfully started operation! CNT will be used to study the equilibrium, stability, and transport of non-neutral plasmas confined on closed magnetic surfaces. CNT will also investigate the potential of toroidal magnetic surfaces to confine electron-positron plasmas and, possibly, antiproton-positron plasmas for production of neutral anti-hydrogen. A photograph of the CNT plasma used for magnetic field line mapping is online. Congratulations to Mark, Richard, Jerry, Ben, and Thomas (and his CNT Team!)

  • Professor Siu-Wai Chan was awarded the 2004 Tan Chin Tuan Fellowship from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

  • Professor I. C. Noyan joins Columbia as a new professor of materials science and engineering. (August 2004)

  • Professor Michael I. Weinstein joins Columbia as a new professor of applied mathematics. (August 2004)