The Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project has renewed two multi-institution awards that fund the CDUX group:

• ALPINE: Algorithms and Infrastructure for In Situ Visualization and Analysis. The overall award is led by James Ahrens of Los Alamos Lab, with Hank Childs as Deputy PI. This effort includes partners at Lawrence Livermore Lab, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Oak Ridge Lab, Sandia Lab, Argonne Lab, the University of Utah, and Kitware, Inc.
• VTK-m: Updating HPC Visualization Software for Exascale-Era Processors. The overall award is led by Ken Moreland of Sandia Labs, and includes partners at Los Alamos Lab, Oak Ridge Lab, and Kitware, Inc.

Funding for these awards runs through 2023.

We are excited to welcome Kristi Belcher, who has agreed to join CDUX as a Ph.D. student in Fall 2017. Kristi previously completed her B.S. at Texas State University, where she worked with Dr. Martin Burtscher as part of the Efficient Computing Laboratory. Her work culminated in a thesis, "Multi-GPU Parallelization of Irregular Algorithms." Further, we congratulate Kristi on winning an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. These fellowships are extremely competitive, and provide Kristi with three years of funding. Great job Kristi, and we are very glad that you will be joining the team!!

The Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project has made two multi-institution awards that will fund the CDUX group:

• ALPINE: Algorithms and Infrastructure for In Situ Visualization and Analysis. The overall award is led by James Ahrens of Los Alamos Lab, and includes partners at Lawrence Livermore Lab, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and Kitware, Inc.
• VTK-m: Updating HPC Visualization Software for Exascale-Era Processors. The overall award is led by Ken Moreland of Sandia Labs, and includes partners at Los Alamos Lab, Oak Ridge Lab, and Kitware, Inc.

Funding for these awards runs through 2019. The press release for all of the ECP software awards can be found here.

Two CDUX Ph.D. students, Ryan Bleile and Stephanie Labasan, have received Lawrence Graduate Scholar Fellowships. This Fellowship is highly competitive and this is thought to be the first time that two awards went to members of the same research group. The fellowship will fund the remainder of their Ph.D.'s, and both students will relocate to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to work with co-advisors at LLNL. Stephanie's proposal, "Optimal Power Scheduling for Visualization on Supercomputers" was sponsored by Barry Rountree and Peer-Timo Bremer. Ryan's proposal, "Simulating Monte Carlo Nuclear Particle Transport On Advanced Computing Architectures" was sponsored by Patrick Brantley and Matthew O'Brien.

The Department of Energy has funded the XVis team to pursue research topics on exascale visualization. The team is led by Ken Moreland of Sandia, and includes partners at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Kitware, UC Davis, and CDUX. Funding for this grant runs through 2017.

CDUX will be part of an Intel Parallel Computing Center aimed at making the VisIt visualization software excel on Intel's Xeon Phi architecture. This project is in collaboration with Sean Ahern and Jian Huang at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

Funding from Conoco Phillips arrived today. We will work with Kelly Gaither and her team from TACC to develop new visualization software for CoP. Our team will be extending VisIt to meet the overall project needs.

The NSF announced that they would fund the SI2 proposal "A Comprehensive Ray Tracing Framework for Visualization in Distributed-Memory Parallel Environments." Our project team will develop the "GraviT" library, which will provide very high quality graphics for very large data sets and be deployable within scientific visualization tools and on diverse platforms. The project is led by Paul Navratil of TACC and also includes partners at ParaTools, Inc and the University of Utah. The library will build on the work that Paul and Hank won best paper for at EGPGV 2012 in Cagliari, Italy.

The SDAV Institute has issued a sub-contract to the University of Oregon to help meet its mission of delivering cutting-edge visualization and analysis software to Department of Energy users. Hank previously was parted of SDAV during his time at Lawrence Berkeley, and serves on the team's Executive Council and as the Chair of its Software Committee. Funding for this grant runs through 2017.

The Department of Energy has transferred Hank Childs' Early Career Award to the University of Oregon. The research for this grant focuses on exascale visualization are is described in depth here. Funding for this grant runs through 2017.