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High Performance Computing (HPC) at UH

Researcher of the Month
Albert S. Kim, PhD

picture of Albert S. Kim, PhD and students

Dr. Kim's major area of study is PAM - Particles, Aggregates, and Membranes. He concentrates on the dynamic behavior of colloids, microorganisms, and nanoparticles in water for environmental studies. For his problems, he needs a supercomputer to scale up his systems more than to speed up the problem calculation. When I first met him in 2003 he was computing on a small cluster that he had built from PCs in his office. Now, in addition to running problems on Squall at MHPCC and Huinalu at UH Hilo, he has recently purchased a powerful 16-node, 32-processor Dell cluster. It is on this cluster that he has just solved a 2.3 billion element dense matrix for a problem with about 18,000 particles, breaking new ground in particle dynamics simulations. This calculation used 25 processors (a 5 x 5 processor grid), and 20 hours of computer time. He currently has three graduate students working with him, seeking more powerful computational resources.

Dr. Kim came to the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at UH Manoa in 2001 from UCLA where he was doing a post doctoral study after receiving his Ph.D. from the same school in 2000. He recently received the prestigious CAREER Award from NSF to work on his PAM research. He was also one of the three recipients of the 2006 Regents's Medal for Excellence in Research, awarded by the UH Board of Regents in recognition of scholarly contributions that expand the boundaries of knowledge and enrich the lives of students and the community. See his Web site.