Faculty Researchers
Project Highlights
Cornell faculty and student researchers leverage CAC computing and consulting services to accelerate discovery and to preserve and disseminate knowledge.
The Cornell projects highlighted below are representative of the broad community that we serve.
New to Cornell? See our New Faculty Flyer for an overview of our capabilities
or watch our Computational Resources for Cornell Researchers video.
Bowers College of Computer and Information Science
David S. Bindel, CS, is leveraging CAC consulting as part of the Simons Collaboration on Hidden Symmetries and Fusion Energy that is producing a modern stellarator
optimization code to exploit the full power of petascale and exascale computers.
James Booth, Director of Graduate Studies in Statistics and Data Science, provides Cornell
graduate students with Red Cloud access and file storage to perform PhD dissertation research.
Institute for Computational Sustainability led by Carla Gomes and Bart Selman
uses the ATLAS2 HPC Cluster to develop constraint optimization, machine learning, and dynamical models for computational sustainability.
Andrew C. Myers, CS, used Red Cloud computing to test Charlotte, a framework for composable, authenticated distributed data structures. Unlike most traditional distributed systems,
including blockchain, Charlotte supports heterogeneous trust.
Noah Stevens-Davidowitz, CS, studies lattices to answer fundamental questions about the security of real-world cryptography. His research team performed experiments on Red Cloud.
Hakim Weatherspoon and his collaborators used Red Cloud to explore data structures that allow
cloud user storage portfolios to be diversified and distributed across many cloud providers. Red Cloud has also been used by his Exotanium start-up.
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Julio Giordano, Animal Science, is collaborating with CAC on a computerized model of a dairy farm that calculates and compares the economic value of dairy reproductive programs so that farmers can make informed decisions.
Chun Han, Molecular Biology & Genetics. CAC developed a Java plugin for ImageJ, created an Eclipse project, and ported a Python code for a dendrite tracing algorithm to Java. The code was then debugged and rewritten to run on Han's system.
Jason Karszes, PRO-DAIRY Program, is working with CAC developers to create a modern re-implementation of their Dairy Profit Monitor web site, which is now hosted on Red Cloud.
J. Nathan Matias, Communications. Red Cloud hosts the CAT Lab software infrastructure for real-time data collections and behavioral experimentation in online communities. The goal is to discover how to improve digital life.
Drew Margolin collaborated with CAC on a real-time analytics and visualization platform for social media that detects and visualizes events and collective emotions for social phenomena, such as the Super Bowl or presidential elections.
Scott McArt, Entomology, has won multiple research awards by collaborating with CAC co-PI Chris Myers and other researchers. McArt is focused on the impact of pesticides, pathogens, and habitat on honey bees and wild bees.
Poppy McLeod, Communications, is collaborating with a CAC computational scientist on using social network analysis on a large-scale dataset in R to discover predictors of leadership.
Frank Pugh, Molecular Biology & Genetics, uses Red Cloud and CAC to maintain his Protein Capture Reagents and Yeast Epigenome portals. CAC also supports 70TB of research lab data and pipelines for NGS DNA sequencing.
Scott Steinschneider, Biological & Environmental Engineering, is using the Hopper HPC Cluster to perform hydroclimate projections, forecasting, and water system analysis to help water managers prepare for climate extremes.
Juleah Tolosky is Director of the NY Future Farmers of America. NYFAA uses CAC's web interface, database design, and Red Cloud computing services to create easy-to-use systems for
Officer Selection and Leadership Development Events.
College of Arts and Sciences
Ananth Group relies on the POOL Cluster to conceive new materials from the atoms-up. POOL is a joint HPC cluster shared by two departments: Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering and Chemistry (PIs: Escobedo, Koch, Joo, DiStasio, Ananth).
Helena Aparicio, Linguistics, investigated the brain bases of human language comprehensions using Red Cloud. Her research brings together computational linguists and cognitive neuroscientists.
Shami Chatterjee, Astronomy, and his research colleagues asked CAC to build a single container of radio astronomy software that can be deployed on the cloud or national HPC resources to detect Pulsars and other fast transients.
Thomas Cleland, Psychology, used Red Cloud with MATLAB for rapid, interactive parallel simulations of neural circuitry that were too large to execute effectively on a desktop workstation.
James Cordes, Astronomy, collaborates with CAC database and scientific workflow consultant Adam Brazier on the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) project.
Robert A. DiStasio Jr., Chemistry & Chemical Biology, runs simulations and ML on molecular properties and chemical reactions using the POOL Cluster. A Slurm partition provides access to large-memory nodes; the largest has 1.5TB RAM and 7TB scratch.
Curt Dunnam, National Biomedical Center for Advanced Electron Spin Resonance Technology, leverages CAC software coding expertise to expand the experiments suite and improve spectrometer performance.
Peter K. Enns, Government, estimated state-level public opinion based on national opinion surveys from 1950 to 2016 on Red Cloud by using RStudio to call Stan and the dgo, an R package for the dynamic estimation of group-level opinion.
Eun-Ah Kim, Physics, pioneered applying machine learning to quantum matter data. CAC built a Docker container, and the Kim Group ran over 1 million hours on Red Cloud. CAC also designed and maintains the WALLE2 Cluster that includes GPUs.
Liam McAllister, Physics, is using Red Cloud to search for solutions of string theory in which the radius of the universe is large. The goal of this research is to transform our understanding of cosmology in quantum gravity.
Sara C. Pryor, EAS, leveraged CAC's $8.2 million NSF Aristotle cloud computing grant. Pryor was 1 of 7 use cases that resulted in 147 project publications. CAC collaborates with faculty to develop research proposals.
Adam Smith - monitors archaeological sites under threat with GIS data workflows developed by CAC and Red Cloud computing and storage.
Madhur Srivastava, Chemistry and Chemical Biology, used CAC's Python programming, server configuration, web interface, and data visualization services to host a denoising of signals service on Red Cloud.
Robert Thorne , Physics, needed a larger simulation capability so he turned to CAC's Red Cloud to model resolution-dependent radiation damage in biomolecular crystallography and biological imaging.
Peter Wittich, Physics, made CAC consultant Steve Lantz part of his grant-winning team to investigate multi-core and many-core technologies for use in tracking in the CMS high level trigger at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.
College of Engineering
Steven Graham Adie, Biomedical Engineering, is using CAC's archival data storage service to store over 200TB of research data. Dr. Adie's research is focused on the development and application of OCT-based imaging.
Ben Cosgrove, Biomedical Engineering. CAC supports NGS and imaging data management for the Cosgrove Lab. The Lab performs systems bioengineering analysis of signal networks in stem cells and tissue regeneration.
Pete Diamessis, Civil & Environmental Engineering, asked CAC to provide guidance to a PhD student on how to adapt a parallel flow solver used in oceanography to attain optimal performance on national supercomputing systems.
Julia Dshemuchadse, Materials Science & Engineering, is using the CAPECRYSTAL GPU Cluster architected
and maintained by CAC to shed light on the self-assembly processes behind the growth of both simple and complex crystal structures.
Craig Fennie uses the TARDIS3 Cluster and first-principles computational techniques such as density-functional theory to study the properties of complex materials at the atomic level. The Benedek Research Group also uses TARDIS3.
Ziv Goldfeld, Electrical & Computer Engineering, is providing first-of-a-kind performance guarantees for neural estimates of statistical distances that may lead to advances in machine learning. Goldfeld uses the Red Cloud platform.
Tobias Hanrath, Chemical & Biological Engineering, provided Red Cloud access to enable undergraduate research in genetic algorithm structure search and finite-difference time-domain simulation of the light absorption in thin films.
Guy Hoffman, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, uses Red Cloud to train Machine Learning models for robot perception in the context of Human-Robot Interaction.
Douglas MacMartin, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, uses CAC's Archival Storage Service to store large-scale data used for solar geoengineering assessments.
David McKellar, Biomedical Engineering, used Red Cloud for single-cell RNA sequencing analysis of ~365,000 transcriptomes from mouse skeletal muscle to study injury response.
David A. Muller, Applied & Engineering Physics, is using the ATLAS Cluster with AMD EPYC processors and NVIDIA GPUs to reconstruct atomic-resolution images.
Christopher K. Ober, Materials Science & Engineering, performed a computational study of scissioning polymer employing a quantum chemistry calculation on Red Cloud.
Lois Pollack, Applied & Engineering Physics, used Red Cloud computing services and stores ~10TBs of data at CAC to enable molecular modeling and data interpretation for the solution of x-ray scattering and serial crystallography experiments.
Reed Research Group uses THECUBE cluster, OSS servers, and Red Cloud to develop water management modeling tools that combine multi-objective optimization, uncertainty modeling, and advanced spatiotemporal visualization.
Samitha Samaranayake, Civil & Environmental Engineering, used Red Cloud for the Smart Transit @ Cornell project that analyzed and optimized multi-modal mobility-on-demand systems.
Gennady Samorodnitsky, Operations Research and Information Engineering, used Red Cloud computing to shed light on the proper statistical foundation of Topological Data Analysis (TDA).
Aaron Wagner, Electrical & Computer Engineering. CAC designed, built, and maintains Commcloud, a cloud-based Digital Communications Lab that allows students to send signals over communication channels and observe their responses.
College of Human Ecology
Eve De Rosa, Psychology. CAC set up a virtual cluster in Red Cloud for the Affect and Cognition Lab (ACLAB). The compute nodes are available on-demand via Slurm. The Lab's methods include fMRI and computational modeling to study the brain.
Zhenglong Gu, Nutritional Sciences, used over 300,000 Red Cloud hours to investigate whether gene transcription could have an important role in determining the mutation rate in the yeast genome.
College of Veterinary Medicine
Daniel Fletcher, Clinical Sciences, leveraged CAC programming services to accelerate the development of software and messaging subsystems for high-fidelity canine and feline simulators.
Parminder Basran, Clinical Sciences, has a keen interest in ML methods in radiation oncology. CAC prepared scripts and demoed how MATLAB PCT works on a local machine and Red Cloud, and provided workflow integration advice.
Renata Ivanek, Population Medicine and Diagnostic Sciences, used Red Cloud to analyze foodborne pathogens data and to run agent-based models that mechanistically simulate the transmission and maintenance of pathogens.
Alejandra Seader, Multimedia Producer, chose CAC for redundant storage to preserve over 20TB of audio and video assets for future continuing education initiatives at the College of Veterinary Medicine.
Cornell Tech
Brian Caruso, arXiv developer. CAC provides extensive development support for arXiv, a free distribution service and an open-access archive with over 2 million scholarly articles stewarded by Cornell Tech.
Research Centers, Venture Development, and Other Units
Bioinformatics Facility led by Jarek Pillardy leverages HPC clusters and web/database servers housed at CAC so that Facility staff experts can focus on delivering core consulting services to Cornell life sciences faculty.
Paul Krause, Vice Provost for External Education, and his eCornell team leveraged CAC staff expertise
and teaching skills to deliver 3 new eCornell certificates:
Python for Data Science, Data Science with SQL and Tableau,
and Data Visualization in Tableau.
Kyle A. Kubick, University Relations, relies on CAC services to back up over 100TB of University Relations' photos and videos stored on their Nexenta server.
David Lifka, former CIO, and CIT staff collaborated with CAC to win a $376,714 NSF grant that upgraded connectivity from the University's main data center to Internet2 to increase the University's bandwidth for research.
Robert Scharf, Academic Administrative Director of the Praxis Center for Venture Development, supports startup business ventures such as Geegah with CAC computing and software consulting services.
Andrew Weislogel, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, used Red Cloud for the Watermark Identification in Rembrandt's Etchings Project, merging digital, computational, and art historical methods to broaden access to watermark information.
SC Johnson College of Business
Andrew Davis, Johnson, called on CAC consulting services to implement a new parallel strategy for his behavioral operations management PCT code which led to near-perfect scaling on Red Cloud with MATLAB.
Murillo Campello, Johnson, is proposing a machine learning approach to Merger & Acquisition outcome prediction using Red Cloud computing and storage.
Will Cong, Johnson, is using Red Cloud to study the most effective combination of managerial actions for a given business objective and to describe managers' objectives in practice (i.e., enterprise value vs. equity value maximization).
Ivan Rudik, Dyson, is developing a dynamic-spatial climate-economy model to understand the impact of climate change and the role of adaption through markets. He is leveraging Red Cloud's capabilities.
Matt Marx, Dyson, links citations from patents to scientific articles using a CAC system that spawns 8 64-core AMD EPYC nodes in a virtual cluster. Marx hand-tuned heuristics and the GROBID ML package to achieve much higher performance than ML alone.
Nathan Yang, Dyson, is using Red Cloud to investigate the role of small victories, (short-term goal achievements measured with large-scale data from popular mobile calorie and weight management apps) on long-term health outcomes.
Weill Cornell Medicine
Curtis Cole, MD and WCM CIO, is collaborating with CAC on low-cost archival storage and computing services for clinical research and transactional systems. WCM�s network has been extended to the Ithaca data center.
Laith Abu-Raddad
and researchers at his Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar Infectious Disease Epidemiology Group used MATLAB on
Red Cloud to analyze the epidemiological differences in the impact of COVID-19 vaccination in the United State and China.
Hiam Chemaitelly, Infectious Disease Epidemiology, used Red Cloud to examine HIV epidemiology among key populations in the Middle East and North Africa regions to inform HIV and Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI) Treatment Guidelines and policy.
Amy Kuceyeski, Mathematics in Neuroscience, ran a 128-core instance in Red Cloud for over two weeks to support her research in quantitative neuroimaging of neurological disorders at the
Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute.
Nicholas Schiff, MD, is focused on enhancing recovery after brain injury. His team ran an EEG analysis that would have taken 2 weeks on a laptop in only 2 hours on CAC�s Red Cloud.
