Participants: Michael E. Papka, Argonne National Laboratory

WTTW TV

EDITOR’S NOTE: In September 2011, I sent news saying how proud the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) was that the UIC Alumni News magazine’s Winter 2010 edition profiled MS ’94 Engineering student Mike Papka in the article “Hard Wired” by Sara Langen. EVL is proud to call Papka one of its own. As a computer science graduate student, he was an EVL research assistant working in the areas of scientific visualization and virtual reality - a passion that continues today.

Over the years, Papka continues to collaborate with EVL in his position as Deputy Associate Laboratory Director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), co-director of the Futures Laboratory in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division, and Director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). He has hired some of the EVL’s best and brightest graduates to join the ANL staff, and currently supports two EVL computer science PhD students.

I am now pleased to announce that Papka was on television’s WTTW on June 18, 2012, to talk about ANL’s new supercomputer Mira, the third fastest in the world, according to twice-annual rankings of the world’s 500 most powerful computer systems.

“Researchers can use Mira to simulate conditions or environments that might be too expensive or impractical to try in real life. Airplane manufacturers test wing prototypes in wind tunnels to measure the airflow around the wings. The companies may only have enough time and resources to build and test a handful of wing designs,” said Michael Papka, director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. “With a supercomputer like Mira, they can test hundreds of models to find the best design.”

See the complete WTTW interview

Papka’s profile in UIC Alumni News article

Email: maxine@uic.edu

Date: June 18, 2012

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