Computer Science and Engineering’s Thain receives NSF CAREER Award

Author: William G. Gilroy and Nina Welding

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Douglas Thain, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame, has been named the recipient of a 2007 National Science Foundation (NSF) Early Career Development (CAREER) Award.

The CAREER program, which was established by the NSF in 1995, recognizes and supports junior faculty who exhibit a commitment to stimulating research while also providing educational opportunities for students. It is the highest honor given by the U.S. government to young faculty in engineering and science.

Thains project, titledData Intensive Grid Computing on Active Storage Clusters,will explore methods of efficiently executing large data-intensive scientific workloads by employing an array of storage servers with embedded computational ability, more closely integrating computation with data storage. The project also will develop new languages, data structures and algorithms to make harnessing the storage clusters easier and includes research activities and curricula directed toward undergraduate and graduate students and a high school outreach program.

A member of the Notre Dame faculty since 2004, Thains research focuses on comparative computingdeveloping tools that allow users to discover, harness and share data and computing power in distributed systems, from small, mobile computers to large computational grids.

Thain earned a bachelors degree in physics from the University of Minnesotaand masters and doctoral degrees in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin.

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