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CIS Undergraduates featured in Fall 2016 CASCADE Magazine

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The human brain can absorb piles of numbers. But it can’t easily convert them into an image of, say, wind speed patterns in a hurricane.

It takes powerful computers running complex software to do those conversions. But that presents an ongoing problem: The computer programs that perform these transformations need to be constantly updated to keep up with ever-evolving technical standards.

At the UO, “keeping up with the pace of change” could be the mantra of a special division in the computer and information science department. It’s a place where undergraduates work alongside graduate students in what is essentially a research-and-development lab.

Undergraduates help design and test programming and other tools that will support the new age of computing—high-performance computing and the visualization of big data. This is the Computing and Data Understanding at Extreme Scale research group, or CDUX, the brainchild of associate professor Hank Childs.

“Our undergraduate researchers play essential roles in the program,” Childs said. “It’s a great thing for them to have on their résumés as they look for jobs.”

Check out the rest of the article, Extreme Computing: Undergraduates Retool Software for the Next Wave of Data Processing in the Fall 2016 edition of CASCADE Magazine.