Researchers with the University of Utah’s School of Computing have received a new three-year $9.7 million grant to extend work on CloudLab, a facility used by scientists to study cloud computing.

“Cloud computing” refers to the technique in which shared data and content are stored and processed in central computer servers for large numbers of people. Companies that use “the cloud” for their services include Netflix, Facebook, Apple’s iTunes and more.

CloudLab consists of three networked computer facilities at the U, Clemson University in South Carolina and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Researchers and students can test their software and applications’ cloud-based features on CloudLab as well as use the facility to develop new features for cloud computing. The U’s facility, which is the largest of the three, is run by School of Computing research associate professor Robert Ricci, research assistant professor Eric Eide, and associate professor Kobus Van der Merwe.

This new phase and additional funding from the National Science Foundation will focus on new features that are not yet available in future cloud-computing technologies, Ricci said, including giving researchers more control over the servers and new security features. He also said the grant will allow CloudLab to double in size so more students and scientists can use it. Currently, the U’s facility in downtown Salt Lake City has nearly 600 servers. Collectively, all three university facilities have aided 470 projects and have run about 50,000 experiments in the last three years.

With this new grant, “we are going to be able to support more researchers on larger clouds and give them more control,” Ricci said.

Lance J. Williams, a University of Utah computer science student during the department’s famed period in computer graphics development in the early 1970s and the inventor of computer image optimization known as mip-mapping, died Aug. 20 of cancer. Williams, who was 67, was living in Los Angeles, according to his Facebook page.

Williams attended graduate school at the U’s then computer science department from 1972 to 1976 along with other department luminaries at the time including Pixar founder Ed Catmull and Netscape founder Jim Clark. He stood out even among these exceptionally capable graduate students. A true Renaisssance man, Williams was a computer science student who already gained recognition for his poetry and artwork.

“Lance Williams was a great and irreplaceable friend for over thirty years. He was an outstanding source of new ideas, interdisciplinary pointers and unusual insights. And he was a key computer graphics pioneer, of course, honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his many contributions to computer animation and film.
But he was also unusually talented in literature, in music and had a wonderful drawing and sketching ability. He had even been a Five State Intercollegiate Chess Champion.

He was kind and thoughtful, helpful to students, generous with his time, and sincere in his efforts. He was remarkably creative and skilled in many different ways, always armed with a wry sense of humor and a penetrating intellect.

It’s rare for all of this creative talent and ability to have been so concentrated in just one person. You never quite knew ahead of time what he might come up with, or suggest, as a new idea.

He was a great and respected friend, as well as being a pioneering computer graphics researcher who had world-wide impact. He will be sorely missed by many people.”
– Professor Al Barr, California Institute of Technology

Lance would make major contributions to graphics, with numerous research papers, three of which would lead to his thesis and a doctorate in computer science from the U in 2000.

A legend in the field of computer graphics, he is best known for inventing texture mip-mapping (demonstrated in his picture to the right), shadow mapping, and image-based rendering, processes used today that allow computerized images to be optimized for better rendering speed and improved picture quality.

During his career, Williams worked in both television and film as well as for companies Apple, Disney, Google, Nokia, and the movie special effects group DreamQuest. He also worked with famed Muppets creator Jim Henson and for Hollywood studio DreamWorks SKG as the head of long-term software development where he worked on such animated films as “The Prince of Egypt,” “The Road to El Dorado,” and “Spirit.” He later received an Academy Award in 2002 for his work in computer animated graphics and special effects and the ACM SIGGRAPH Coons Award in 2001 for his contributions to computer graphics.

“Lance’s subsequent spectacular career was clearly foretold early in his graduate study, for he exhibited all the prerequisite qualities,” said U computer science professor Rich Riesenfeld. “Namely, he was passionately and tenaciously motivated to establish himself in computer graphics, extraordinarily original and resourceful in his thinking, and prodigiously and broadly talented. And, all of these attributes were embodied in a profoundly humanistic spirit. It was a privilege to be Lance’s thesis advisor and then lifelong friend.”

In 2012, Williams joined Nvidia Corp. as a researcher for the company’s VR and face-tracking groups where he worked until his passing.

“Those who knew him will remember most his unfailingly polite manner; his gentle, erudite, and wickedly funny sense of humor; his incredibly creative insights on technological problems; and his seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of science, engineering, history, and art,” a co-worker wrote on Nvidia’s website. “His brilliant, creative mind will be sorely missed.”

PRUNERS, a software project launched jointly by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, University of Utah, and RWTH Aachen, has been named a finalist in the 2017 “R&D 100 Awards.” From Utah, the project was led by University of Utah School of Computing professor Ganesh L. Gopalakrishnan and SOC assistant professor Zvonimir Rakamaric.

The PRUNERS (Providing Reproducibility on Ubiquitously Non-deterministic Environments and Runs) project provides tools that seek to locate and eliminate many sources of computer execution variability that, if left unchecked, can render results emerging from Extreme Scale computing platforms untrustworthy. It consists of four tools: one to identify programming errors at the message-matching (MPI) level; one for programming errors at the shared memory (OpenMP) level; a tool to systematically inject noise and accelerate testing; and another to check for numerical reproducibility across compilers and platforms. The Utah team played a significant role in the creation of two of these four tools, with active involvement from doctoral students Simone Atzeni and Michael Bentley, and research assistants Geof Sawaya and Ian Briggs.

The awards, sponsored by R&D Magazine, honors the year’s 100 most innovative technologies. The winners will be announced during the annual R&D 100 Conference in Tampa, Florida, on Nov. 17. The finalists were chosen by a panel of more than 50 judges representing research and development leaders in a variety of fields. The awards are given to the top innovations in five categories: Analytical/Test, IT/Electrical, Mechanical Devices/Materials, Process/Prototyping, and Software/Services.

The complete list of finalists can be found here.

The Salt Lake Tribune recently published a profile on University of Utah College of Engineering graduate Ed Catmull, who now is president of both Walt Disney Animation and Pixar Animation and responsible for some of the biggest money-making animated movies in history, including “Toy Story,” “Monsters Inc.” and “Finding Nemo.”

Catmull graduated from the U’s famed computer science department and was one of that department’s pioneers in computer graphics, along with other noted alumni as John Warnock and Alan Kay.

Below is the Tribune’s story.

That success came after Catmull grew up in the Salt Lake Valley and earned a doctorate at the University of Utah. His degree focused on computer-generated graphics, which led down a rock-strewn path 21 years later, to “Toy Story.”

“As much as anyone on the face of the earth, Ed has pushed computer-generated visuals into people’s lives,” said Richard B. Brown, dean of the U.’s College of Engineering.

But what Catmull talks about these days is not so much the animation technology he helped develop, nor all the movies. Rather, it’s the business of managing creativity, or, as he would put it, removing barriers so employees’ creativity can shine through a sometimes stifling hierarchy.

To read the full story, click here.