The Department of Computer Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute has several open Ph.D. student positions. Our College of Engineering consistently ranks among the best in the United States.

Qualifications required include a BS/MS (diploma) in Engineering, Computer Science, or Mathematics, and strong interest in research. Interested candidates hould contact Prof. Adrian Sandu (address below).

Our group's research interests are in the area of computational science/numerical analysis/parallel and high performance computing. We have a lot of interesting projects going on. We develop numerical algorithms and software for the simulation of air pollution, for the assimilation of observational data into the models, adaptive mesh and time-step algorithms for large scale parallel simulations, methods to model systems with uncertainty, etc. Besides air pollution, other applications include mechanical engineering, fluid mechanics, and computational biology.

Please go to the web page http://people.cs.vt.edu/~asandu/Research/research.html for a brief description of some of the current projects.

The research environment at Virginia Tech is exceptional for doctoral studies and research in the area of Computational Science. The Computer Science Department has a strong group in computational science, numerical analysis, and high performance computing. Research encompasses parallel and grid computing, numerical linear algebra, optimization, numerical methods for ode/pde, etc, with diverse application areas.

The College of Engineering at Virginia Tech considers Computational Science a high priority direction, and performed a "cluster hire" in 2004 of several new faculty in our area. The university has recently built System X. This cluster has 1,100 nodes, each node containing two 64-bit PPC970 2GHz Apple G5 processors, 4MB of memory, and 160 GB of storage. The communication backplane uses Inifiniband technology and allows 20 Gbps full duplex bandwidth. Recent benchmarks showed a sustained performance of over 12.5 Tflop/s, positioning this machine as the third fastest supercomputer in the world (and the fastest academic supercomputer). See e.g., http://computing. vt.edu/research_ computing/ terascale.

For more information please contact me directly at the address below.