This project is a collaborative effort among members of several Departments and multiple institutions, all parts of the City University of New York (CUNY). The group effort includes the Department of Mathematics, the Department of Computer Science, and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at City College of CUNY; the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Lehman College of CUNY, the Department of Computer Science of the Graduate Center of CUNY, and the Department of Mathematics of the Graduate Center of CUNY. The research tool that serves as the hub for the planned activity is a large Beowulf computational cluster, to be housed at City College.
The planned research projects are genetic algorithms in combinatorial group theory, evolutionary tree reconstruction in computational biology, computer experiments on parafree groups, modelling turbulent fluid flows arising in the early stages of combustion, and questions and simulations in computer networking. The cluster will be administered under the Center for Algorithms and Interactive Scientific Software (CAISS) at City College. This cluster will also provide an important resource for the undergraduate and graduate students of CUNY, by giving access to computing power not usually found at primarily undergraduate colleges.
The research topics span a wide range of computer science, computational science, and mathematics. They share the common approach of involving both experiments and theory, relying on exploitation of computational resources.