All CCT research activities are organized into broad, interdisciplinary “focus areas,” each led by a CCT faculty member. Staff within the focus areas develop research agendas that share expertise and technologies across LSU departments, which makes them eligible for federal grants. Focus areas are coordinated by the CCT Assistant Director for Computing Applications, Gabrielle Allen, Ph.D., one of the lead creators of the Cactus toolkit.

Focus Areas:

Core Computational Science
This focus area is researching and developing methods, tools and techniques to enable a broad array of applications areas, integrating faculty from the LSU Departments of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mathematics in the development of software, algorithms and hardware. Research groups in this area include Scientific Computing, Distributed Systems, Çomputational Mathematics and Visualization.

Coast to Cosmos
This focus area is building research groups to model the complex physical world in which we live. The Coast to Cosmos research groups have common needs for advanced software to support large-scale simulations, collaborative tools to enable diverse sets of scientists to interact and visualization and analysis tools to understand results and compare experiments. This area includes faculty from the LSU Departments of Physics and Mechanical Engineering, with research groups in Numerical Relativity & Astrophysics, Engineering Applications, Coastal and Environmental Studies and Computational Fluid Dynamics

Numerical Relativity

Cultural Computing
The Cultural Computing Focus Area concentrates on complex computational applications in the humanities, arts, business and social sciences, exploring the intersection of technology and creativity, and how such technology can be effectively used and adopted with groups such as animation and visualization. The LSU/CCT Laboratory for Creative Arts and Technologies, which houses dedicated research labs for audio, video and tangible technologies, as well as an Access Grid-enabled classroom, a10-Gbit networking and the Imaginarium (a large, open room with space for visualization research), is integral to this focus area. Emerging Computational Applications and Technology Adoption are the research groups in this focus area.

Material World
The Material World focus area develops research groups in the computational fields of material science, chemistry and biology. Current activity in this area involves faculty in the LSU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

System Science and Engineering
The LSU Center for Computation & Technology research program in advanced computer systems is a multi-departmental, interdisciplinary concentration on hardware and software subsystems that in synthesis comprise and advance quality properties of computers, in particular but not limited to high-performance computing. Research projects are conducted in computer architecture, operating systems, system area networks, compiler and runtime techniques and software, parallel programming models and languages, and secondary storage. Additional cross-cutting topics of strong interest are symbolic computing and dynamic graph processing, power aware methods, reliability and fault tolerance, and machine learning. The research projects are performed in part in the Computer Systems Science and Engineering Laboratory. Research in this focus area is sponsored by NSF, NSA, DARPA, DOE, NASA, and the industrial sector as well as additional support by CCT.