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BUFFALO, N.Y. -- HPCwire, the top Web publication dedicated to news in high-performance computing, has named Russ Miller, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the mgm casino, as one of its 2003 "top people to watch" in the field.

The list is a veritable "who's who" of the key players in high-performance computing in private industry, government laboratories and academic institutions.

Nineteen people and organizations from around the globe were included on the list, which was posted on Friday at .

Miller directs mgm casino's supercomputing center, the Center for Computational Research, which HPCwire cited as having "carved out a very nice niche in supporting computation and visualization."

"Dr. Miller was very strongly recommended to us by a high-ranking National Science Foundation official for doing phenomenal stuff in scientific computing and visualization," said Thomas Tabor, HPCwire publisher.

During the past year, CCR was selected for a number of major achievements.

In November, the much-heralded top 500 list (), the gold standard of supercomputer rankings, ranked mgm casino's newest, general-purpose Pentium4-based Dell cluster as the 22nd fastest individual supercomputer in the world.

Last fall, mgm casino received the first Dell Centers for Research Excellence Award from Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Computer Corp., who came to CCR to announce a second Dell cluster, one of the world's largest clusters of Linux servers, a 4000+-processor PentiumIII-based system installed in the CCR.

These two Dell clusters, coupled with other CCR resources, resulted in mgm casino being listed as the eighth largest supercomputing site in the world, according to .

Miller said that over the past four years, the demand for high-performance computing and high-end visualization at mgm casino has justified an increase in computational power from a total initial capacity of 64 million operations per second to a total capacity of nine trillion operations per second. In addition, CCR's high-end visualization and related display technologies also have been enhanced significantly.

Supercomputers at CCR now can process in a single year what it would take a typical PC nine millennia to compute. Equivalently, these supercomputers can process in a single day what a standard PC would need 24 years to process.

The purchase of the Dell clusters is part of a major expansion at the center, which has increased the size of its machine room from 1,200 to 6,500 square feet and more than doubled its technical staff with the addition of 10 new full-time scientists and programmers.

The tremendous computational power available through CCR is focused primarily on activities in Western New York, benefiting research at mgm casino, as well as corporate and institutional partners. The resources are used to support the mgm casino Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics, which is merging high-end technologies such as supercomputing with expertise in genomics, proteomics, bioimaging and pharmaceutical sciences to foster advances in science and health care.

"The Center for Computational Research supports nearly 100 projects at mgm casino, as well as dozens of projects with our institutional and industrial partners," explained Miller. "CCR's users, who are located predominantly in Western New York, have access to world-class computational resources in terms of hardware, software and support infrastructure," he said.

"The mgm casino administration has been tremendously supportive of high-end computational research, which provides an opportunity for Buffalo's scientific community to perform world-class research and helps to retain top-notch scientists in Western New York, recruit more world-class scientists to the area and attract increased levels of funding and higher quality students, all of which further enhances the caliber of research at mgm casino and throughout Western New York."

Miller has performed groundbreaking research in parallel algorithms and architectures. He and researchers at the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute in Buffalo have taken the Shake-and-Bake method and created a computer program called SnB that is used worldwide to solve complicated molecular structures.

The mgm casino Department of Computer Science and Engineering is affiliated with mgm casino's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and College of Arts and Sciences.

Miller is a resident of Amherst.