9622200 Hearn A SPARC station 20 Multiprocessor Workstation with Solaris User Environment and two 75 Mhz Processors will be acquired to support research in the Center for Applied Optimization where a mix of applied and fundamental projects are conducted. The research will focus on the major areas of applied optimization and algorithm research. The particular projects to be focused upon are: (1) decision modeling for water management, involving development of models and algorithms for determining optimal alternative water supply strategies; (2) bounded flow approach to congestion pricing using new nonlinear programming and variational inequality methods to determine system optimal tolls for controlling congestion in urban street networks; (3) computational algorithm development for new lower bound heuristics and exact algorithms to solve classes of NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems; and (4) molecular conformation and protein folding algorithm development and implementation for global minimization of nonconvex energy functions. The equipment will improve the research environment of the important projects identified above. The equipment will make an already productive center even more so. The improvements to the infrastructure should lead to new discoveries or fundamental advances.
