MSEAS research on the development of methodologies to determine and optimize path planning for automated underwater vehicles (AUVs) was highlighted on the front page of the MIT web site on Thursday 8 March 2012. The system can provide paths optimized either for the shortest travel time or for the minimum use of energy, or to maximize the collection of data that is considered most important. The development team included mechanical engineering graduate students Tapovan Lolla and Mattheus Ueckermann SM ’09, Konuralp Yigit SM ’11, and research scientists Patrick Haley and Wayne Leslie. The work was funded by the Office of Naval Research and by the MIT Sea Grant College Program. The full article can be found here.

The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) has awarded $600,000 in seed grants to seven multi-university teams on issues ranging from the ecosystem off the New England coast to medical imaging to the speed of computing itself. The MGHPCC is designed to promote research collaboration among the participating universities (Boston University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts) through high-performance computing, a pillar of all scientific inquiry today. The seed grant program is intended to accelerate the MGHPCC’s mission of computational collaboration.

From the MGHPCC web site: “To complement the forthcoming deployment of a state-of-the-art underwater observation platform, part of the NSF-sponsored Ocean Observatories initiative, John Marshall (MIT), Pierre Lermusiaux (MIT), Amala Mahadevan (WHOI) and Amit Tandon (UMass Dartmouth) will create models to provide insights into the turbulent mixing that regulates nutrient cycle and ocean ecosystem dynamics off the New England coast.”

The full announcement can be found here.