From the Dean’s Desk The start of fall semester is always a time of promise and new beginnings. First year students arrive full of enthusiasm and wonder. Returning students come back to classrooms and labs ready for new discoveries. New and returning faculty members prepare lessons and continue challenging research with large numbers of undergraduate and graduate students. Again this fall, we have an increase in enrollment with 1,556 undergraduate students and a total enrollment of 2,021 including students with engineering minors and graduate students. These numbers are up from 1,450 undergraduate students in fall of 2009 and 1,881 overall students that same year. Thanks to the hard work of faculty, staff and students, our College continues to achieve success in many ways: • Research awards in 2010 totalled more than $9.3 million, up from $3.9 million just two years ago. • Graduate student enrollment continues to climb with 463 students conducting research in seven departments. • Undergraduate student Mallory Yates, MBE, was named NASA’s Co-op Student of the Year at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. After spending the summer working in professor Don Plumlee’s micropropulsion lab, she is back in Houston this semester working again for NASA. • New visualization capabilities help us “see” what was previously undiscoverable. Whether we are studying wind energy, biomedicine, or Mars, or training future engineers and scientists, this technology opens new worlds of connection, investigation and understanding. • Well deserved promotions highlight exceptional faculty contributors. • Notable success in engineering education research lays Boise State’s foundation for enhanced STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) teaching and learning at all levels. • Construction Management begins its next thirty years as an academic program. • And, the College again ranks among the nation’s best public, comprehensive engineering schools. After seven years at Boise State University, I remain consistently impressed by the creativity, diligence, ingenuity and entrepreneurship of our students, staff and faculty. What a truly great place to learn and live. Join us!
Cheryl B. Schrader Dean and Professor College of Engineering
2
College of Engineering Newsletter | Fall 2010
Visualization Cluster Display Gives Researchers a Powerful New Tool
What did you do this summer?
by Erin Ryan
CS Student Mark Stewart Wrote 30,000 Lines of Code and Started a Company
The College of Engineering is home to a new visualization cluster display — 16 linked monitors powered by layers of high performance computers and many millions of pixels that turn the naked eye into a precision research instrument.
(from left) Graduate students Dana Jacobsen and Brad Baker stand with assistant professor Inanc Senocak and computer systems administrator Martin Lukes in front of the new visualization cluster display in the College of Engineering. Its projection of the Messier 51 “Whirlpool” Galaxy reveals more detail at a much higher resolution than a high-end computer could.
It’s all about programmable GPUs (graphics processing units), according to Inanc Senocak, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical & Biomedical Engineering. The cluster is part of his project on integrated supercomputing and visualization for aerodynamics analysis, and he said testing its capabilities has been eye opening.
“This is more detail at a much higher resolution than you would get on a high-end computer,” Senocak said, pointing to the cluster’s crisp projection of minutiae in the electric swirl of the Messier 51 “Whirlpool” Galaxy. “Whether you’re studying biomedicine on a microscope slide or looking at a photograph for clues to past water activity on Mars, displays like this enable a more sophisticated level of investigation and understanding.” The hardware combines the processing power of multiple computers into a single “many-core” system, supporting complex scientific computation and the visualization of massive datasets that are too unwieldy to analyze on small screens and degrade if blown up on big screens. Senocak primarily is using it to conduct computational fluid dynamics simulations. From modeling the dispersal of airborne pollutants in urban environments to identifying favorable wind conditions for energy generation over complex terrain, he said the cluster is essential for fast computations and sensitive analysis. Senocak’s long-term goal is to build a facility that surpasses the resolution of NASA’s 128-screen, 256 million-pixel “hyperwall-2,” which would make Boise State a destination for scientific computing and visualization research. Joining him in this endeavor are computer systems administrator Martin Lukes and computer science graduate students Dana Jacobsen and Brad Baker.
“The technology benefits research and applications in fluid dynamics, climate modeling, wind energy, astrophysics, biology, chemistry and materials, to name a few,” “This surge in computational power, fueled by the programmable manycore GPUs, is expected to lead scientific discovery in the years to come.” – Inanc Senocak, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical & Biomedical Engineering
by Margaret Scott
Computer Science undergraduate student Mark Stewart Jr. spent his summer vacation writing software code for his new company, ScheduleTailor, an online web application that helps companies manage employee schedules. Stewart came up with the idea for the online scheduling tool to help roommate, Trevor Shephard, set up employee schedules for the Dawson’s coffee shop in the Multipurpose Building at Boise State which is run by College of Business and Economics students. One thing led to another for the duo, and ScheduleTailor was born. After winning the People’s Choice Award at Idaho Tech Connect’s Tech Launch competition for new tech ideas in May, the two students took their $5,000 prize and began to develop their company’s beta version in earnest. “We are in the pre-release stage now and we’re looking for a beta user,” Stewart said. “Beta customers will help us learn what people want and where the glitches are. We’ve come a long way but we still have a long way to go,” the 24-year-old Stewart says. ScheduleTailor is also working with Nebula Shift, a local software development group, to further develop the company. Stewart also credits Rick Ritter of Idaho Tech Connect as a “real mentor to us about how to get this business off the ground.” Stewart says his most important lesson was discovering what matters in the business world. “I learned from a manager's view what it means when you show up late or when you do things that are bad for the company and the bottom line. Now I know that what really matters is being a person who benefits the company in a significant way and who makes people around them feel happy.”
MSE Undergraduate Student Earns Summer Scholarship in Germany Steven Livers, MSE, was awarded a summer scholarship from the International Materials Institute to work in one of the most prestigious groups dealing with nano-ionic non-volatile memory devices in the world at the RheinWestvalishe Technische Hochschule (RWTH) Aachen, Germany. ECE Professor Maria Mitkova helped Livers with his application.
Student Club Aims To Build World’s Fastest Vegetable Oil-Powered Vehicle Boise State is home to more than 200 student clubs, but never has there been one quite like Greenspeed. Fueled by the intrepid vision of six students and two recent graduates in the College of Engineering, its purpose is to design, build and race the world’s fastest vegetable oil-powered vehicle at Utah’s famed Bonneville Salt Flats during Speed Week 2011. Founder Dave Schenker is a mechanical engineering student whose own car is modified to run on vegetable oil. For the past two years he has been recruiting for Greenspeed, which became a sanctioned university organization in June. The club comprises engineering undergraduates Jozey Mitcham, Adrian Rothenbühler and Adam Spiegelman, graduate student Cory Sparks, alumni John Pasley and Jason Brotherton, and former Boise State student Brett Keys, who helped found the project and remains a contributor. visit: http://news.boisestate.edu/update/2010/08/31/student-clubaims-to-build-world%E2%80%99s-fastest-vegetable-oil-powered-vehicle/
Turf buster
Inanc Senocak, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical & Biomedical Engineering, observes a high-resolution image of the Majestic Sombrero Galaxy. Thanks to the many-core computing architecture connected to the 16-monitor display, he can see a lot more than would otherwise meet the eye. In addition to visualization research, the technology also supports high-level scientific computation.
Seth Kuhlman, MSME ‘07, ME ‘05 alumnus and lab manager for the university’s Center for Orthopaedic and Biomechanics Research (COBR), is pictured changing a cleat to test on the surface of the turf in the Caven-Williams indoor practice facility. Kuhlman is leading a recently contracted research project for a major golf spike producer. The company wants to move into the football market, and Kuhlman is using Boise State’s “Turf Buster” to test its new cleat design against the industry standard. Kuhlman built the 1,200-pound instrument for an NFL-funded study on stadium surfaces that was proposed and overseen by COBR co-directors Michelle Sabick, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical & Biomedical Engineering, and Ron Pfeiffer, chair and professor in the Department of Kinesiology.
College of Engineering Newsletter | Fall 2010
7