Ariful Azad, an assistant professor of intelligent systems engineering at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, was awarded funding as part of the Department of Energy’s Mathematical Multifaceted Integrated Capability Centers.
The DOE announced $56 million in funding will go to four projects addressing fundamental mathematics research problems affecting the nation.
These projects require the integration of multiple mathematical topic areas.The DOE listed 22 award winners from around the country.
Azad is one of six principal investigators for Sparsitute: A Mathematical Institute for Sparse Computations in Science and Engineering.
This institute will build a new generation of research, tools, and methods to enable scientists and engineers to use sparsity -- where dependencies and relationships among data, models and elements grow relatively slowly as problems get larger -- to solve large-scale science and engineering problems. It includes scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Indiana University, Purdue University, University of Illinois, and Wake Forest University.
Azad will receive $1.2 million for five years to develop parallel algorithms for sparse matrix and tensor computations, and graph machine learning.
“Our research group, HipGraph, has been developing high-performance graph and machine learning algorithms for a decade,” Azad said.
“Through this institute, our students will work with leading scientists across the nation to solve various sparse problems of national priorities.
“Our ambitious research agenda will drastically advance the state-of-the-art in sparse computations within three broad pillars in mathematics and data science: sparse matrix computations, sparse tensor problems, and sparse network problems, as well as their interconnections. Thus, our institute will have a synergistic impact on scientific data analysis investments by DOE.”
The Mathematical Multifaceted Integrated Capability Centers (MMICCs) supported by this funding opportunity will enable five-year, multi-institutional collaborations for cross-cutting mathematics.