Skjellum key player in international project

A Mississippi State computer scientist is a key player in a federally funded effort that will write software to benefit federal government agencies and industry.

Anthony Skjellum is a principal investigator for The Parallel Mathematical Libraries Project, funded by the U.S. Industry Coalition.

USIC, with members from industries and universities, specializes in the commercialization of high-tech opportunities from the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union and the U.S. Department of Energy. It operates in areas important to American competitiveness, at the same time providing opportunities for growth in NIS markets.

Skjellum is working with scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., with computer scientists at the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics in Sarov, Russia, and with representatives of Intel Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif.

The research team met on the Mississippi State campus recently, where they collaborated at the computer science department and at the MSU/National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulation.

The scientists are designing mathematical software for large-scale problem solution.

"This software will be used by engineers and mathematicians for complex numerical solutions," Skjellum explained. "Mississippi State is providing the design, and 17 scientists at the Russian laboratory are implementing it." The research team that met at the university recently will validate the software, he said.

The Parallel Mathematical Libraries Project will allow others to write calculations using software that measures a problem code in hundreds of thousands of lines, Skjellum said. "It will fill an important gap, because something like this hasn't existed before."