Georgia Tech is quickly advancing toward realization of a new “High Performance Computing Building” in Tech Square and has awarded three grants totaling $450,000 to research teams that include College of Computing faculty.

The grants are intended to help define how research could expand into new areas with community partners, and possibly be housed in the new collaborative space.

Approved by the Board of Regents in May, the new HPC Building will be a 695,000-square-foot, mixed-use complex next to the Scheller College of Business on Spring Street in Midtown Atlanta. The primary goal is to bring academia and industry together to share ideas, data and development of real-world solutions for commercialization. Georgia Tech would occupy about half of the office and data center space.

The College of Computing plays a part in three of six grants awarded from the Executive Vice President of Research Office under the Georgia Tech Innovation in Data Engineering and Science (IDEAS) program.

The grants can be used to:

• explore open issues in data science and engineering and what Georgia Tech needs to do to lead in that area
• determine the impact of solving these problems
• identify potential community partners and collaborators, and
• advise building design plans to support such research space.

The grants do not imply or guarantee space in the new building, but help define the infrastructure (such as physical areas or staffing) needed to meet those research goals.

Awardees in the College of Computing are:

• Edmond Chow (CSE) with Nagi Gebraeel (ISYE), Ahmed Shabbir (ISYE), Daniel Campbell (GTRI), and Andrew Howard (GTRI) for “Development of Scalable Analytics Platform Prototype for the Power Generation Industry.”  Funding is for $300,000 over two years, with matching funds of $300,000 from GE Corporation.
• Co-leads James M. Rehg (IC) and Jimeng Sun (CSE) for "Computational Health: Integrated Big Data Analytics for Improving Health Outcomes." Additional participating faculty include Mark Braunstein (IC), Gari Clifford (Emory BMI), Gregory C. Gibson (BIO), Omer Inan (ECE), Dongmei (May) Wang (BME), and Richard Vuduc (CSE).
• Beth Mynatt (IC) for “Analytics for Transforming Health and Healthcare” with Rahul Basole (IPaT), Julie Swann and Nicoleta Serban (ISyE), May Wang (BME), Kevin Maher (CHOA/Emory), Myung Choi and Leanne West (GTRI), and Margaret Dahl (EI2).
  
  

Sun says his team wants to ingite an emerging market sector around a scalable and open-source "health prediction engine" that analyzes big data to guide risk, treatment and prevention. Chow and colleagues want to research large-scale distributed computer hardware that can collect actionable information from thousands of sensors in an energy field. Mynatt's team aims "to create a transformative, industry-focused enterprise in Georgia Tech health analytics to create, assess and deploy learning health systems," she says.

"IDEAS is all about growing extramural sponsored research and attracting partners to locate with us on campus or nearby," said Steve Cross, executive vice president for research. "I think those are both pretty good ideas."

The building is scheduled to break ground in 2016 and open in 2018.