Dr. David Y.Y. Yun, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering on the Manoa Campus, just returned from sabbatical with a brand new idea for the next project to be run on his LIPS 240 a cluster of 240 Intel Celeron processors. He inherited this supercomputer in 2002 from Square USA, the producers of the feature film Final Fantasy. In its prior life, the LIPS 240 was the rendering farm to produce many of the animations in this landmark full-length animation film. With a lot of students, work, and sweat, he transformed it into the workhorse today, a general purpose Linux cluster, used for design, simulation, virtual experiments, and, of course, teaching.
When his work needs faster or bigger resources, he has access to MHPCC, so his current plans are to keep the LIPS 240 running in its current configuration for teaching and small-to-moderate sized jobs. The system was used recently in a project to develop a breast cancer detection system. Then it was utilized to develop a Prostate Image Registration, funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH) to work with Pet Scanners. The latest project that Dr. Yun is pursuing is the analysis of MRI brain images to determine the extent of damage to the brain in drug addicts.
Dr. Yun has received funding from several sources, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), DARPA, NASA, NIH, foreign governments (like Taiwan's Ministery of Education) and private companies (like Hamamatsu Photonics). His research group includes two postdoctoral fellows, six graduate students (several from other UH departments), and one undergraduate student.
Dr. Yun came to UH in 1989 from Southern Methodist University, where he was the chair of Computational Science and Engineering. He received his Ph.D. from MIT followed by a 10-year stint at IBM Research before entering academia, starting with a sabbatical at Stanford's Computer Science Department. To find out more about Dr. Yun's research, education and collaborations, visit his website at http://www-ee.eng.hawaii.edu/~dyun.
