Dr. James Potemra received his B.S. in Physics at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. He went on to earn an M.S. in Oceanography at Florida State University, followed by his Ph.D. from University of Hawai'i Manoa. After a post doctoral fellowship at the University of Washington, he returned to UH Manoa to the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC), where he has remained for the past seven (7) years.
He teaches Global Environmental Science and Earth System Databases, a class that teaches students about accessing large climate science databases.
Dr. Potemra's research at the IPRC has been funded jointly by NOAA, NASA and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC). This included the purchase and maintenance of several HPC clusters, including 32-node and 16-node AMD Opteron Linux clusters, a single-node, 48-CPU Intel Itanium 2, and a single-node 32-CPU Mips R12000 IRIX cluster. Add to this the workstations that complement the center, and they had a sizable center. Dr. Potemra used the power of these super clusters to study variability in the western Pacific, Indian Ocean and Indonesian seas. He uses them to reduce and visualize the data, as well as to run layered ocean models. To read more about his research, go to Dr. Potemra's website at http://iprc.soest.hawaii.edu/people/potemra.html or the IPRC website at http://iprc.soest.hawaii.edu/research/research.html.
With new funding from NOAA, Dr. Potemra will continue his research on a more local level. The Hawai'i Ocean Observing System (HiOOS)is a newly funded project within the School of Ocean and Earch Science and Technology (SOEST). The four major thrust areas of HiOOS are Coastal Resiliency, Marine Ecosystem Stewardship, Coastal Ocean-State and Forecast, and Automated Water Quality Sensing. Prof. Potemra has installed a 128-node Dell Power Edge server in SOEST to support HiOOS initially. He expects to increase computational capacity before long. Watch future issues for more news on HiOOS!
