Faculty Receive NSF Award

YOUNG OHIO STATE RESEARCHERS RECEIVE NSF CAREER AWARDS

     COLUMBUS -- The National Science Foundation recently 
recognized three young faculty at The Ohio State University with 
its prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award.

     Grants were awarded to 337 junior-level university faculty 
nationwide from more than 1,700 proposals. The new program is 
designed to encourage scientists and engineers to integrate their 
research and education efforts early in their careers.

     "These three award recipients are prime examples of recent 
outstanding additions to our faculty," said Edward F. Hayes, 
vice president for research. "They have been successful in 
developing strong research programs at an early stage in their 
careers and are having a significant impact on our educational 
offerings."

     The Ohio State recipients are:

     -- Philip Grandinetti, of COLUMBUS (43212), assistant 
professor of chemistry, who was awarded approximately $220,000 
over three years for "Solid-State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance 
Spectroscopic Investigations of the Structure of Silicate 
Glasses."

     Despite the long history and success of the glass industry, 
the design and preparation of glasses has been made more 
difficult by a lack of sound theoretical models relating the 
atomic structure to properties, Grandinetti said. Unlike the 
situation for crystalline materials, the atomic structure of one 
of the simplest glasses, vitreous silica, is still not well 
established and is the subject of considerable debate within the 
scientific community.

     The goal of Grandinetti's research is to characterize and 
quantify atomic structural distributions in silicate glasses 
using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. This work should 
provide new insights into the structure of silicate glasses and 
its relationship to their bulk properties.

     Since receiving the NSF award, Grandinetti's research has 
been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society 
and the Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids.

     Grandinetti has taught at Ohio State for three years.

     -- Thomas Page, of UPPER ARLINGTON, assistant professor of 
computer and information science, who received approximately 
$135,000 over three years for "Performance Evaluation of 
Optimistic Replicated File System Architectures."

     Page's research involves architectures and algorithms for 
maintaining the consistency of replicated data in file systems, 
databases or distributed shared memories. People and programs 
expect multiple copies of data to act exactly like a single copy, 
only with better performance and availability. Traditional 
synchronization approaches take a pessimistic approach and expend 
significant resources trying to guarantee to prevent problems 
that would likely not have occurred anyway. The optimistic 
approach, investigated in Page's work, seeks to exploit the 
infrequency of synchronization problems by detecting and 
recovering from the occasional conflict, at significant cost and 
performance savings.

     Since receiving the NSF Career Award, Page has received a 
grant from the National Security Agency, as well as equipment 
grants from NSF and the Ohio Board of Regents' Action Fund.

     Page has taught at Ohio State since 1993.

     -- Dhabaleswar Panda, of COLUMBUS (43214), assistant 
professor of computer and information science, who received 
nearly $110,000 over three years for "Communication and 
Architectural Supports for Implementing Distributed Shared Memory 
on Wormhole Networks."

     Panda's research involves designing new generation of 
interprocessor communication mechanisms and interconnection 
networks to support scaleable high-performance computing. 
Distributed shared memory is gradually emerging as a popular 
parallel programming paradigm for a large number of applications. 
However, current generation parallel systems supporting this 
paradigm exhibit poor performance because of heavy communication 
and synchronization overheads.

     Panda is developing a new multidestinational message passing 
communication framework so that future generational parallel 
systems can support the DSM paradigm efficiently, with a 
multifold gain in performance.

     Panda received a Research Initiation Award and an equipment 
grant from NSF prior to this award. He received two additional 
equipment grants from NSF, an equipment grant from the Ohio Board 
of Regents, and a research grant from IBM.

     Panda has taught at Ohio State for five years.

                             #

Contacts: Philip Grandinetti, 292-6818
          Thomas Page, 292-5835
          Dhabaleswar Panda, 292-5199


[Submitted by: Von Reid-Vargas (ereid@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu)
               
Mon, 14 Oct 1996 11:55:58 -0400]
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