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An article co-authored by James Raynolds, assistant professor of nanoscience at CNSE, made the list of Top 25 Hottest Articles downloaded from the ScienceDirect online library, which comprises more than a quarter of the world's scientific, medical and technical information.
The article, "Applications of Conformal Computing techniques to problems in computational physics: the Fast Fourier Transform," was published in Computer Physics Communications (Volume 170, Issue 1, 1 July 2005, pages 1-10). Professor Raynolds co-authored the article with Lenore R. Mullin, UAlbany professor of computer science and NSF program director.
Read the full article here.
ScienceDirect is a "digital library" of more than a quarter of the world's scientific, medical and technical information online, including over 2,000 peer-reviewed journals from among 24 subject areas and hundreds of book series, handbooks and reference works.
Their "Top 25 Hottest Articles" results reflect the number of downloads by ScienceDirect users in a particular three-month period. The quarterly service allows scientists, researchers and others to see which science-related articles have been downloaded the most, providing a window into the specific content that colleagues are reading, and related trends in the scientific arena.
Dr. Raynolds' article discusses Conformal Computing, a mathematically-based design methodology which provides a systematic approach to the most efficient organization of all levels of software and hardware design hierarchy - from high-level software constructs to the design of the integrated circuits.
The vision of Conformal Computing is to algebraically connect the hardware and software through linear transformations, from high-level specifications of the problem to the low-level instruction sets of the underlying hardware. In the early days of computing, in which programs were written directly in assembler, this vision was more easily realized on single-processor, single-memory systems. Today, however, the situation is considerably more complex in that there are many levels of software, and processor-memory separating the high-level problem specification and the hardware.
Using the design principles of Conformal Computing, without any specialized optimization, leads to portable, scalable code that is competitive with other well-tuned machine specific routines. The theory constitutes a uniform way of reasoning about physics and the data structures that define physics on computers.
Professor Raynolds' primary research focus area is the use of large-scale computer calculations to study matter at the atomic scale. These calculations are based on the Density Functional Theory of electronic structure - a methodology for solving the quantum mechanical equations for the many-electron problem.
An important application area is problems in molecular transport. Studies in this area are closely tied to experimental efforts aimed at developing electrical interconnects consisting of molecular wires. The use of theoretical calculations serves to guide and interpret experimental results. As such, calculations serve as a "virtual laboratory" in which information can be gained, which may be difficult or impossible to obtain experimentally. Such calculations are also being used to study fundamental problems in spintronics.
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