GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The University of Florida today unveiled the state’s most powerful supercomputer, a machine that will help researchers find life-saving drugs, make decades-long weather forecasts and improve armor for troops.

The HiPerGator supercomputer and recent tenfold increase in the size of the university’s data pipeline make UF one of the nation’s leading public universities in research computing.

“If we expect our researchers to be at the forefront of their fields, we need to make sure they have the most powerful tools available to science, and HiPerGator is one of those tools,” UF President Bernie Machen said. “The computer removes the physical limitations on what scientists and engineers can discover. It frees them to follow their imaginations wherever they lead.”

For UF immunologist David Ostrov, HiPerGator will slash a months-long test to identify safe drugs to a single eight-hour work day.

“HiPerGator can help get drugs get from the computer to the clinic more quickly. We want to discover and deliver safe, effective therapies that protect or restore people’s health as soon as we can,” Ostrov said. “UF’s supercomputer will allow me to spend my time on research instead of computing.”

The Dell machine has a peak speed of 150 trillion calculations per second. Put another way, if each calculation were a word in a book, HiPerGator could read the millions of volumes in UF libraries several hundred times per second.

UF worked with Dell, Terascala, Mellanox and AMD to build a machine that makes supercomputing power available to all UF faculty and their collaborators and spreads HiPerGator’s computing power over multiple simultaneous jobs instead of focused on a single task at warp speed. HiPerGator features the latest in high-performance computing technology from Dell and AMD with 16,384 processing cores; a Dell|Terascala HPC Storage Solution (DT-HSS 4.5) with the industry’s fastest open-source parallel file system; and Mellanox’s FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand interconnects that provide the highest bandwidth and lowest latency. Together these features provide UF researchers unprecedented computation and faster access to data to quickly further their research.

UF unveiled HiPerGator on Tuesday as part of a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the 25,000-square-foot UF Data Center built to house it. HiPerGator was purchased and assembled for $3.4 million, and the Data Center was built for $15 million.

Also today, the university announced that it is the first in the nation to fully implement the Internet2 Innovation Platform, a combination of new technologies and services that will further speed research computing.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The University of Florida is the first university to fully connect to the Internet2 Innovation Platform’s three components, an achievement that will transform research at UF and provide a national model for research computing.

The move will allow UF researchers to easily share enormous amounts of data at ultrahigh speeds in collaborations with scientists worldwide.

“Universities across the country are following closely our progress and leadership in this area” said UF Vice President and Chief Information Officer Elias Eldayrie. “They are looking to our experience to learn from it, and we are glad to share it.”

About 30 other universities are working to fulfill the requirements to use the Internet2 Innovation Platform, which provides the advanced networking opportunities necessary for big data research, such as genome sequencing and climate studies.

“It’s exciting that the University of Florida is the first campus to complete the three components of the Internet2 Innovation Platform. Re-architecting the University of Florida network to support software-defined networking, 100G abundant bandwidth and unique support for data-intensive science positions Florida for a new cycle of growth and scientific research,” said Rob Vietzke, Internet2 vice president of network services.

“As other universities also follow Florida’s lead to provide researchers advanced networks with their collaborators and the increased capacity of this unique 100 gigabit per second nationwide network, we can expect new scientific, educational, and economic breakthroughs,” Vietzke said. “The whole academy of higher education can look forward to seeing how Florida innovators and researchers will use this Internet2 Innovation Platform to develop new applications and services never previously possible.”

The Internet2 Innovation Platform provides a high-speed, friction-free computing environment and requires universities that participate to commit to three changes in research computing architecture.

UF is the first to achieve all three: a 100 Gbps connection to Internet2, a Science DMZ, and use of software-defined networking, or SDN.

UF activated its ultra-high-speed 100 Gbps connection in January, a 10-fold expansion of the research standard, 10 Gbps. Only three other institutions are connected to Internet2 at that speed.

UF is a pioneer in the Science DMZ arena, and at a recent Internet2 Innovation Platform meeting was bombarded with questions from other universities about how to make it work, Eldayrie said.

“The University of Florida has led in the DMZ area since 2004 and can provide an example for research that requires this technology,” Eldayrie said.

The Science DMZ separates university administrative computing – transcripts and payrolls, for instance – from research computing, which requires a free flow of information without cumbersome firewalls and switches. UF has had a Science DMZ since 2004, but recently upgraded it from 20 Gbps to 200 Gbps.

Erik Deumens, director of research computing, said the Science DMZ functions as a dedicated network for research on campus, providing a kind of “HOV (high-occupancy-vehicle) lane for research.”

The third requirement was software-defined networking, which allows a researcher to program a network so a colleague anywhere on that network can view, share and manipulate data. SDN solves the problem of getting a variety of machines used by different scientists to talk to each other and ends the days of scientists filling portable hard drives with data and shipping them to collaborators.

Deumens said one of the requirements of participation in the Innovation Platform is to test the limits of SDN, which UF will do this summer in collaboration with Fermilab, a high-energy particle physics laboratory near Chicago.

“We will do a high-bandwidth data transfer with Fermilab, test the technology, and see what lessons we learn,” Deumens said.

On the commodity Internet, Deumens said, information travels in small packets that sometimes take odd detours and a long time to reach a destination, making huge datasets a problem. SDN allows a researcher to tell a switch at a routing station, “I’m going to send a packet, and a billion more will follow, and I want you to treat them all the same way, let them all through, quickly,” Deumens said.

UF is already a key collaborator on several big data projects and one of the top five institutions in contributing computing power to verifying the massive datasets associated with the Higgs-Boson particle discovery. In just one month last year, UF contributed 1,419,000 hours of computing to that project.

“Our researchers now have tools at their disposal that no one else in the country has. They can lead the big data conversation, and this computing infrastructure will give them a competitive advantage in securing funding,” Eldayrie said. “We can recruit the best minds in the world.”

Added Deumens: “Our researchers can think up things they couldn’t imagine without this infrastructure.”

The expansion of research computing on the Internet2 Innovation Platform could have a mind-boggling economic benefit. The original investment in the commodity internet was $400 million over several years. Today, the Internet accounts for more than a trillion dollars a year in economic activity, Vietzke said.

With the help of University of Florida mechanical engineering professor W. Gregory Sawyer and UF postdoctoral researcher Brandon Krick, Florida State University paleobiologist Gregory Erickson determined the teeth of hadrosaurs — an herbivore from the late Cretaceous period — had six tissues in their teeth instead of two. The results were published in the journal Science Oct. 5.

“When something has been in the ground 65 million years, by and large we pick it up and we look at it and say, ‘oh, look at what has been preserved.’ But we don’t mechanically interrogate fossils to see if there is other information,” Sawyer said. “When we started to mechanically interrogate these teeth, what we found was all of these properties were preserved, and one other thing: these teeth were a lot more complicated than we thought.”

For years, Erickson, who has a background in biomechanical engineering and studies bone biomechanics as a paleobiologist, had thought so. So he turned to the UF Tribology Laboratory, which researches the science of friction and surface wear.

Engineers don’t often see the interesting paleontological questions, Sawyer said. One look at the surface of the dinosaur teeth piqued his interest, however, because he is intrigued by how wear occurs across surfaces with different materials. The shape of the tooth made him think it was much more complex than previously thought.

From an engineering perspective, Sawyer said his lab often works with composites that contain different material properties that wear differently, so the question was whether just two materials — enamel and dentine — would wear the way the hadrosaur teeth did. Sawyer and Krick thought not, and turned to nanoindenters and microtribometers.

Just a decade ago, a paleontologist might not have asked engineers for help, and they could not have helped him. In the last 10 years, however, Sawyer said advances in engineering — tribology and nanoscience, in particular — make it possible to test more materials, even those millions of years old.

Erickson said reptilian dinosaurs have been dismissed as simplistic creatures in their feeding and dental structure. They were herbivores, their teeth composed of enamel and dentine. The fossil record did little to contradict that.

Testing with nanoindenters and microtribometers, however, proved the conventional wisdom wrong.

“Hadrosaurs’ teeth were incredibly complicated, among the most complex of any animal,” Sawyer said. “These dinosaurs had developed a lot of tricks.”

The duck-billed hadrosaur was a toothy creature with up to 1,400 teeth, Erickson said. The teeth migrated across the chewing surface, with sharp, enamel-edged front teeth moving sideways to become grinding teeth as the teeth matured. The adaptation allowed hadrosaurs to bite off chunks of bark and stems and chew them to a digestible mush, leading Erickson to describe them as “walking pulp mills.” The teeth wore down at the rate of 1 millimeter per day, cycling through the jaw like a conveyor belt, before falling out or being swallowed. The dinosaurs lost about 1,800 teeth a year, leaving behind plenty of fossils for testing.

When the fossils emerged from batteries of tests, the researchers found six tissues in the tooth structure, not two.

“Modern tools told us there were different materials in there,” said Sawyer, who is also a UF Research Foundation Professor and Distinguished Teaching Scholar.

Erickson said the work could not have been accomplished without Sawyer’s lab, “arguably the best tribological lab in the world,” and said he is excited about the possibilities for new avenues of research. There are drawers full of fossils in collections around the world that may have more information to yield.

Sawyer agrees, and says that more engineering data could well be buried in fossils.

“Perhaps now it makes sense to take some of that fossil record, when we have other pieces of the record, and start to do things like sectioning and histology,” Sawyer said. “There are opportunities now with modern scientific tools to probe their mechanical and tribological properties. If we treat a fossil as a modern material, what happens? Do the mechanical properties track?”

The collaborative nature of the Florida university system was a key to getting the work done, Sawyer said, as was the funding his research gets from the University of Florida Foundation.

“It took us five years to do this because it was always a side project and wasn’t funded. We could chew on it at our own pace,” Sawyer said. “This is exactly what you hope for when you endow research, that people will take those funds and do things that are scientifically significant.”

As part of DOE’s ongoing commitment to support university-led nuclear research and development, the department is awarding $19.9 million for fuel cycle research and development at 32 U.S. universities and colleges, including the UF College of Engineering, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Case Western Reserve University.

“This grant recognizes the outstanding research that is being conducted at the University of Florida’s Laboratory for Development of Advanced Nuclear Fuels and materials,” said James S. Tulenko, professor emeritus in the nuclear engineering program and principal investigator on the grant. “We aim to make strides in making nuclear fuel a safer and more efficient energy for America and the world.”

Tulenko is an expert in nuclear fuel processing and performance, engineering application of radioisotopes, nuclear fuel cycle economics, radioactive wastes, reactor analysis and system analysis.

Tulenko and his team will study the use of diamond nanoparticles composite material on fuel pellets to improve the thermal conductivity of the nuclear fuel resulting in reduced fuel temperatures, fuel thermal expansion, thermal cracking and fission gas releases. This would produce a better performing, higher burn-up and more accident-tolerant fuel. The research team has extensive experience in researching nano-diamond particles as an addition to the reactor coolant for improved plant thermal performance. Additionally, an economic study of the benefit resulting from the higher discharge burn-up expected with this fuel will also be conducted.

Graphene solar cells are one of industry’s great hopes for cheaper, durable solar power cells in the future. But previous attempts to use graphene, a single-atom-thick honeycomb lattice of carbon atoms, in solar cells have only managed power conversion efficiencies ranging up to 2.9 percent. The UF team was able to achieve a record breaking 8.6 percent efficiency with their device by chemically treating, or doping, the graphene with trifluoromethanesulfonyl-amide, or TFSA. Their results are published in the current online edition of Nano Letters.

“The dopant makes the graphene film more conductive and increases the electric field potential inside the cell,” said Xiaochang Miao, a graduate student in the physics department. That makes it more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity. And unlike other dopants that have been tried in the past, TFSA is stable — its effects are long lasting.

The solar cell that Miao and her co-workers created in the lab looks like a 5-mm-square window framed in gold. The window, a wafer of silicon coated with a monolayer of graphene, is where the magic happens.

Graphene and silicon, when they come together, form what is called a Schottky junction — a one-way street for electrons that when illuminated with light, acts as the power conversion zone for an entire class of solar cells. Schottky junctions are commonly formed by layering a metal on top of a semiconductor. But researchers at the UF Nanoscience Institute for Medical and Engineering Technologies discovered in 2011 that graphene, a semi-metal, made a suitable substitute for metal in creating the junction.

“Graphene, unlike conventional metals, is transparent and flexible, so it has great potential to be an important component in the kind of solar cells we hope to see incorporated into building exteriors and other materials in the future,” said Arthur Hebard, distinguished professor of physics at UF and co-author on the paper. “Showing that its power-converting capabilities can be enhanced by such a simple, inexpensive treatment bodes well for its future.”

The researchers said that if graphene solar cells reach 10 percent power conversion efficiency they could be a contender in the market place, if production costs are kept low enough.

The prototype solar cell created in the UF lab was built on a rigid base of silicon, which is not considered an economical material for mass production. But Hebard said that he sees real possibilities for combining the use of doped graphene with less expensive, more flexible substrates like the polymer sheets currently under development in research laboratories around the world.

Researchers at the University of Florida are looking for ways to minimize environmental hazards associated with a material likely to play an increasingly important role in the manufacture of these goods in the future. The results of their most recent studies are published in the March 2012 issue of Nanotoxicology.

Carbon nanotubes are already being used in touch screens and to make smaller, more efficient transistors. And if current research to develop them for use in lithium ion batteries is successful, carbon nanotubes could become important technology for powering everything from smartphones to hybrid vehicles. But for all of the promise developers see in this emerging technology, there is also some concern.

“Depending on how the nanotubes are used, they can be toxic – exhibiting properties similar to asbestos in laboratory mice,” said Jean-Claude Bonzongo, associate professor of environmental engineering at UF’s College of Engineering. He is involved in a research collaboration with Kirk Ziegler, a UF associate professor of chemical engineering, to minimize this important material’s potential for harm.

In particular, the UF team is investigating toxicity associated with aqueous solutions of carbon nanotubes that would be used in certain manufacturing processes.

“At the nano-scale, electron interactions between atoms are restricted, and that creates some of the desirable traits like the high conductivity that manufacturers want to take advantage of with carbon nanotubes,” Ziegler said. “But exploiting those properties is difficult because the nanotubes tend to clump together.”

For that reason, carbon nanotubes have to be treated in some way to keep them dispersed and available for electron interactions that make them good conductors. One way to do it is to mix them with an aqueous solution that acts as a detergent and separates the tangled bundles.

“Some of the surfactants, or solutions, are toxic on their own,” Bonzongo said. “And others become toxic in the presence of carbon nanotubes.”

He and Zeigler are focusing their investigations on solutions that become hazardous when mixed with the carbon nanotubes. Their most recent results indicate that toxicity can be reduced by controlling the ratio of liquid to particulate.

A cost-effective means of unbundling nanotubes remains one of the last hurdles for manufacturers to clear before they can employ the technology in mass-produced electronics. Current processes used for laboratory prototypes, including mechanical homogenization or centrifugal sifting, would be too expensive for manufacturing consumer electronics. For that reason, liquid suspension agents may be the way forward if we are to have nano-tech products for the masses.

“It’s an emerging technology,” Bonzongo said. “We want to get ahead of it and make sure that the progress is sustainable — in terms of the environment and human health.”

“Imagine making solar panels by a process that looks like printing newspaper roll to roll,” said Franky So, a UF professor in the department of materials science and engineering.

Industry has eyed the roll-to-roll manufacturing process for years as a means of producing solar cells that can be integrated into the exterior of buildings, automobiles and even personal accessories such as handbags and jackets. But, to date, the photovoltaic sheets cannot muster enough energy per square inch to make them attractive to manufacturers.

The UF team has crossed the critical threshold of 8 percent efficiency in laboratory prototype solar cells, a milestone with implications for future marketability, by using a specially treated zinc oxide polymer blend as the electron charge transporting material. The full report outlining the details of their latest laboratory success in solar cell technology is published in the Dec. 18 online version of Nature Photonics.

The researchers said the innovative process they used to apply the zinc oxide as a film was key to their success. They first mixed it with a polymer so it could be spread thinly across the device, and then removed the polymer by subjecting it to intense ultraviolet light.

John Reynolds, a UF professor of chemistry working on the project, said the cells are layered with different materials that function like an electron-transporting parfait, with each of the nano-thin layers working together synergistically to harvest the sun’s energy with the highest efficiency.

Reynolds’ chemistry research group developed an additional specialized polymer coating that overlays the zinc oxide polymer blend.

“That’s where the real action is,” he said. The polymer blend creates the charges, and the zinc oxide layer delivers electrons to the outer circuit more efficiently.”

Reynolds’ chemistry research team is aligned in an ongoing collaboration with So’s materials science team, which they call “The SoRey Group.”

The most recent fruit of their collaboration will now go to Risø National Laboratory in Denmark, where researchers will replicate the materials and processes developed by the SoRey Group and test them in the roll-to-roll manufacturing process.

“This sort of thing can only happen when you have interdisciplinary groups like ours working together,” said Reynolds.

So and Reynolds plan to continue their collaboration with Risø National Laboratory, and expand it to include researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology where Reynolds is now moving. Their work is funded by a grant from the Office of Naval Research.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — University of Florida researchers may help resolve the public debate over America’s future light source of choice: Edison’s incandescent bulb or the more energy efficient compact fluorescent lamp.

It could be neither.

Instead, America’s future lighting needs may be supplied by a new breed of light emitting diode, or LED, that conjures light from the invisible world of quantum dots. According to an article in the current online issue of the journal Nature Photonics, moving a QD LED from the lab to market is a step closer to reality thanks to a new manufacturing process pioneered by two research teams in UF’s department of materials science and engineering.

“Our work paves the way to manufacture efficient and stable quantum dot-based LEDs with really low cost, which is very important if we want to see wide-spread commercial use of these LEDs in large-area, full-color flat-panel displays or as solid-state lighting sources to replace the existing incandescent and fluorescent lights,” said Jiangeng Xue, the research leader and an associate professor of materials science and engineering “Manufacturing costs will be significantly reduced for these solution-processed devices, compared to the conventional way of making semiconductor LED devices.”

A significant part of the research carried out by Xue’s team focused on improving existing organic LEDs. These semiconductors are multilayered structures made up of paper thin organic materials, such as polymer plastics, used to light up display systems in computer monitors, television screens, as well as smaller devices such as MP3 players, mobile phones, watches, and other handheld electronic devices. OLEDs are also becoming more popular with manufacturers because they use less power and generate crisper, brighter images than those produced by conventional LCDs (liquid crystal displays). Ultra-thin OLED panels are also used as replacements for traditional light bulbs and may be the next big thing in 3-D imaging.

Complementing Xue’s team is another headed by Paul Holloway, distinguished professor of materials science and engineering at UF, which delved into quantum dots, or QDs. These nano-particles are tiny crystals just a few nanometers (billionths of a meter) wide, comprised of a combination of sulfur, zinc, selenium and cadmium atoms. When excited by electricity, QDs emit an array of colored light. The individual colors vary depending on the size of the dots. Tuning, or “adjusting,” the colors is achieved by controlling the size of the QDs during the synthetic process.

By integrating the work of both teams, researchers created a high-performance hybrid LED, comprised of both organic and QD-based layers. Until recently, however, engineers at UF and elsewhere have been vexed by a manufacturing problem that hindered commercial development. An industrial process known as vacuum deposition is the common way to put the necessary organic molecules in place to carry electricity into the QDs. However, a different manufacturing process called spin-coating, is used to create a very thin layer of QDs. Having to use two separate processes slows down production and drives up manufacturing costs.

According to the Nature Photonics article, UF researchers overcame this obstacle with a patented device structure that allows for depositing all the particles and molecules needed onto the LED entirely with spin-coating. Such a device structure also yields significantly improved device efficiency and lifetime compared to previously reported QD-based LED devices.

Spin-coating may not be the final manufacturing solution, however.

“In terms of actual product manufacturing, there are many other high through-put, continuous “roll-to-roll” printing or coating processes that we could use to fabricate large area displays or lighting devices,” Xue said. “That will remain as a future research and development topic for the university and a start-up company, NanoPhotonica, that has licensed the technology and is in the midst of a technology development program to capitalize on the manufacturing breakthrough.”

Other co-authors of this article are Lei Qian and Ying Zheng, two postdoctoral fellows who worked with the professors on this research. The UF research teams received funding from the Army Research Office, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Florida Energy Systems Consortium.

None, however, yet uses what researchers at the University of Florida believe is the world’s first explosive detection system that utilizes ultraviolet light to zero in on specks of dangerous explosives found on these items.

“We are absolutely the only one using differential reflectometry,” said one of the system’s inventors, Rolf Hummel, a professor emeritus in UF’s department of materials science and engineering.

Hummel also thinks that had his team’s detection system been in place last October, it would have detected an explosive package disguised as a printing toner before it slipped past airport inspectors in Yemen and ended aboard a jet in Dubai preparing to fly to the U.S. A tip from intelligence agents, not technology, eventually averted a tragedy.

The detection system also may have provided an extra layer of protection to airport workers. “Our goal,” said Hummel, “for our technology is for it to make speedy decisions at security check points and minimize the involvement of human beings to keep them safe.”

The fully automated device is based on patented technology pioneered at UF five years ago by Hummel and fellow UF researcher Paul Holloway that utilizes the science of differential reflectometry.

The scanning process begins when UV light shines on pieces of luggage moving on a conveyor belt commonly used in airport security systems. Any residual amounts of TNT or any other explosive powder on the surface of these objects absorb the incoming light at specific varying wavelengths, depending on the chemical makeup of the material. The system instantly provides a spectrographic analysis of the absorption spectrum of the light after it has been reflected back into the device.

The computer compares this “fingerprint” with those of known explosives stored in its memory. If a match occurs, the device beeps to alert security officers.

Programmers also have equipped the system’s computer with algorithms — a sort of digital instruction manual — that are designed to allow the detection device to consider all the possibilities that are sent to it, including fingerprints of new or unknown explosive materials that may emerge in the future, explained Thierry Dubroca, a UF postdoctoral research associate, working on the project.

“Fingerprints of explosive materials,” he said, “are unique and very recognizable.”

Dubroca also is the CEO of Delta R. Detection, a Gainesville-based startup now gearing up to license the UF-patented technology to tap the growing worldwide explosives detection market, estimated to exceed $3 billion in the U.S. market alone.

So far, the research team has received about $1.4 million in federal, state and private money for product development.

Said Hummel: “I’ve been a scientist for 50 years and I’ve always wanted to something that really helps mankind. “I now feel satisfaction.“

“Since Hurricane Andrew struck Florida back in 1992, Florida’s building construction professionals and building officials have continually improved their structural load paths, which means that connections between the roof and wall framing and between wall to foundations have been strengthened,” said David O. Prevatt, an assistant professor of civil and coastal engineering at the University of Florida and principal investigator of the project. “In contrast, older homes in Tuscaloosa had mainly toe-nailed rafter connections, and almost none had adequate foundation anchors.”

The project is being funded by a National Science Foundation RAPID Response Grant for Exploratory Research to investigate and gather data about wind damage to, and performance of, wood-frame structures in the affected areas.

Prevatt acknowledged that there is no defense against the most devastating tornado winds, which can top 200 mph, but he said he believes improvements in home construction can make houses and apartment buildings safer in less-severe tornado conditions.

“There is no magic bullet here. An EF4 or EF5 level wind will still level even the best-constructed homes in its path,” Prevatt said. “The challenge facing us is to somehow improve performance of our existing homes so that more of them can survive the less intense EF0 to EF2 tornado and by so doing better protect its occupants.”

The NSF recognized the urgency with the grant request because this type of data on structural failures is perishable; once debris removal begins, there is no way to analyze the performance of the wood structures, said John W. van de Lindt, a professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at the University of Alabama. The grant is being provided to UF to work in close collaboration with UA and other researchers.

The research team inspected the 5.9-mile affected tornado path in Tuscaloosa on May 2-5 to analyze wood-frame structures that were not damaged by trees. The team received clearance from FEMA’s Engineering Division and inspected 150 structures, including single-family homes (one- and two-story) and apartment complexes. Collecting more than 3,000 photos, the team determined the EF-Scale rating in relation to damage for each of the 150 structures, with values ranging from EF0 to EF5, depending on the location within Tuscaloosa.

Based on that data, Prevatt said, states that experience frequent tornado activity would be well-advised to beef up their building codes to more closely resemble those in the Sunshine State. However, he said, even more lives and property could be saved by encouraging homeowners to retrofit their houses to be more wind-resistant.

“Retrofitting is a costly business but the opportunities might exist immediately after a disaster to build back something that will perform better than what was lost. This requires effort to go above and beyond the minimum current requirements of the building code,” Prevatt said. “But realistically what price are you willing to pay for your family’s safety? “

Other team members include:

• Andrew Graettinger, associate professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering; and David Grau, assistant professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering, The University of Alabama
• William L. Colbourne, director of wind and flood hazard mitigation, Applied Technology Council
• Rakesh Gupta, professor of wood science and engineering, Oregon State University
• Shiling Pei, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, South Dakota State University
• Samuel Hensen, branch engineering and technical manager, Simpson Strong-Tie Co.

The team will continue working with the National Science Foundation grant and the International Residential Code to begin the process of making changes to ensure load paths are enhanced to better protect the life safety of the occupants. The research team also will be available for the city of Tuscaloosa and surrounding areas as the rebuilding process begins.

The new transistor design resolves a key issue that has kept the organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, technology used in small screens from being viable for computer monitors or televisions.

“It’s a very practical sort of development that could have big implications for consumers,” said UF physics professor Andrew Rinzler, author of a paper about the development that appears in the April 29 issue of the journal Science. “Progress from LCD to OLED has been slow. This new design should remove some of the stumbling blocks that have prevented OLEDs from being implemented in larger displays.”

OLED display pixels use less power, create a brighter picture and don’t have the viewing-angle issues of LCD pixels, which consume power even when they are their dark state.

Despite these advantages, OLED displays have been largely limited to hand-held devices because of the difficulty of making transistors to drive the OLEDs. The new transistor design opens up possibilities to tackle that problem with a new transistor that uses organic semiconductors —man-made compounds that contain carbon. Though much researched and improved over the last several decades, these materials consume too much power when used in the conventional transistor design.

That’s where the new design comes in. Making use of carbon nanotubes, it allows organic semiconductors to efficiently drive the high currents needed by OLED pixels, but at lower voltages.

In addition to redesigning the transistor that powers the OLED within each pixel, the team also combined the transistor and the OLED into a single device called a light emitting transistor. The resulting carbon nanotube enabled vertical organic light-emitting transistor, or CN-VOLET, is more than eight times more energy efficient than the closest competing devices.

That leads to another advantage, Rinzler said: “The light emitter can occupy more of the pixel area, giving the same light output at a lower current density through the light emitter. Since high current density degrades the lifetime of the light emitter, the change should make these devices last longer.”

The integrated design should also reduce manufacturing complexity, which could lead to lower costs, Rinzler said.

In addition to its potential impact on consumer electronics, the development also could help pave the way for more affordable radio frequency identification tags, which are used in inventory tracking for retailers, Rinzler said.

Other members of Rinzler’s research team were postdoctoral fellows Mitchell McCarthy and Bo Liu in cooperation with Doyoung Kim and professor Franky So of UF’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, with help from the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at Oak Ridge National Labs in Tennessee. The work was supported by Nanoholdings LLC and the National Science Foundation.

In November, the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, for the first time ever, named the Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Computer Center in Tainjin, China as No. 1.

In his state of the union speech, President Barack Obama noted, “Just recently, China became home of the world’s largest solar research facility, and the world’s fastest computer.”

But that list does not include reconfigurable supercomputers such as Novo-G, built and developed at the University of Florida, said Alan George, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and director of the National Science Foundation’s Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing, known as CHREC.

“Novo-G is believed to be the most powerful reconfigurable machine on the planet and, for some applications, it is the most powerful computer of any kind on the planet,” George said.

“It is very difficult to accurately rank supercomputers because it depends upon what you want them to do,” George said, adding that the TOP500 list ranks supercomputers by their performance on a few basic routines in linear algebra using 64-bit, floating-point arithmetic.

However, a significant number of the most important applications in the world do not adhere to that standard, including a growing list of vital applications in health and life sciences, signal and image processing, financial science, and more under study with Novo-G at Florida.

Most of the world’s computers, from smart-phones to laptops to Tianhe-1A, feature microprocessors with fixed-logic hardware structures. All software applications for these systems must conform to these fixed structures, which can lead to a significant loss in speed and increase in energy consumption.

By contrast, with reconfigurable machines, a relatively new and highly innovative form of computing, the architecture can adapt to match the unique needs of each application, which can lead to much faster speed and less wasted energy due to adaptive hardware customization.

Novo-G uses 192 reconfigurable processors and “can rival the speed of the world’s largest supercomputers at a tiny fraction of their cost, size, power, and cooling,” the researchers noted in a new article on Novo-G published in the January-February edition of the IEEE Computing in Science and Engineering magazine.

Conventional supercomputers, some the size of a large building, can consume up to millions of watts of electrical power, generating massive amounts of heat, whereas Novo-G is about the size of two home refrigerators and consumes less than 8,000 watts.

Later this year, researchers will double the reconfigurable capacity of Novo-G, an upgrade only requiring a modest increase in size, power, and cooling, unlike upgrades with conventional supercomputers.

In their article, the researchers discuss Novo-G and its obvious advantages for use in certain applications such as genome research, cancer diagnosis, plant science, and the ability to analyze large data sets.

Herman Lam, an electrical and computer engineering professor and co-investigator on Novo-G, said some vital science applications that can take months or years to run on a personal computer can run in minutes or hours on the Novo-G, such as applications for DNA sequence alignment at UF’s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research.

CHREC is comprised of research sites at four universities including Florida, Brigham Young, George Washington and Virginia Tech. In addition, there are more than 30 partners in CHREC, such as the U.S. Air Force, Army, and Navy, NASA, National Security Agency, Boeing, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, Monsanto, Northrop Grumman, and the Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Sandia National Labs.

The money will fund research on three potential delivery methods that may one day allow doctors to target tumors in hard-to-reach places without damaging healthy cells nearby. All three projects rely on nanotechnology.

Working with Grobmyer, an associate professor of surgery at the University of Florida College of Medicine, are surgical resident researcher Dr. Luke Gutwein and College of Engineering researchers Brij M. Moudgil, a professor and director of the Particle Engineering Research Center; Scott Brown, a research assistant scientist at the center; and Vijay Krishna and Parvesh Sharma, both postdoctoral associates at the center.

The aim of the DOD Breast Cancer Concept Award program is “to probe new promising avenues of research that are a little high risk, high reward,” said Grobmyer, who is a member of the UF Shands Cancer Center and the medical director of the UF Shands Breast Cancer Center.

The Department of Defense funded only about 5 percent of the 1,238 Concept Award applications it received. The defense department grants, each worth $111,376 for one year, will begin in October. In addition, the Philadelphia-based Margaret Q. Landenberger Research Foundation has awarded Grobmyer $250,000 for two years.

The grants will allow UF’s researchers to conduct preliminary studies and collect data needed to secure funding for further research on potential delivery methods. The research could lead to less invasive treatments that are more effective and more comfortable for patients than current procedures. They also could enable new theranostic strategies, which link therapeutic and diagnostic techniques, for breast cancer.

“Right now what we do is we image cancer, and then we design a treatment for it,” explained Grobmyer. “With theranostics, which nanotechnology is enabling, you can combine the diagnosis and treatment all into one modality.”

One delivery method the team will investigate would require attaching treatment or imaging nanoparticles to glucose molecules and injecting the combined materials into the patient. Because cancer cells consume much more glucose than healthy ones do, tumors will take in many of the glucose cells and accompanying nanoparticles. Grobmyer and Brown are co-principal investigators on this project.

Another potential method would envelop nanoparticles inside malignant cells that have been removed from the patient and treated with radiation so they cannot reproduce. These cells would then be injected back into the patient. Data from previous studies show malignant cells within a patient find and attach themselves to active tumors, thus delivering any treatment or imaging nanoparticles they are carrying.

Brown, the principal investigator on this project, said the method could be especially helpful for patients with cancers that have just begun to metastasize. He is hopeful some of the reinjected tumor cells would find small groups of active malignant cells growing in the patient, ones too small to be effectively targeted by traditional imaging methods for imaging or therapy.

“Right now a problem is detection. If you have metastatic disease, basically it’s a waiting game,” he said. “You wait until you can actually get something to show up on a PET, CT or an MRI. But with this, if it’s effective, any patient who gets a tumor removed who may be at risk for metastatic disease may just take an injection and later undergo whole body imaging.”

Deactivated tumor cells from cancer patients have been used in previous research on cancer vaccine development, but using them for treatment delivery is a novel approach, Grobmyer said.

“If you change your approach and say, ‘OK, we’re not going to modify the particle but we’re going to use the patient’s own tumor to deliver the particles,’ it might be a way to get around some of the issues related to delivery,” he said.

The third project, which is also supported by the Margaret Q. Landenberger Research Foundation, proposes using polyhydroxy fullerenes, soccer-ball-shaped carbon molecules modified by UF engineers, to deliver nanoparticles to tumors for treatment and magnetic resonance imaging.

The team will use a method called “optical heating” to damage tumors. Krishna and Moudgil helped develop the method, which was described in a letter published online by Nature Nanotechnology in March 2010.

Optical heating uses a “really low-intensity, low-energy laser” to heat the fullerenes, Moudgil explained.

“We can penetrate deeper into the (cancerous) tissue without harming the surrounding healthy tissue.”

He said the method “has strong potential for cancer detection and therapy applications.”

These are the kinds of developments the whole team hopes will lead to breakthroughs in cancer treatment.

“The beauty of the nanotechnology is you separate the delivery from the treatment,” Grobmyer said. “The treatment actually becomes the easy part, in a way, because we can kill cancer cells a bunch of ways. We just have to be able to specifically get the material we want there.”

The university’s Florida Museum of Natural History received $3.8 million to study the history of climate change and biodiversity in Panama, and the College of Engineering received $3.1 million to study multiphase fluid mechanics with leading institutes in Japan and France.

“One of the primary goals of the project is to build internationally competent researchers among future U.S. scientists through innovative research and learning experiences,” said Doug Jones, director and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum and principal investigator on the museum’s grant.

Students and researchers participating in the museum grant will collect fossils from deposits excavated from the Panama Canal during construction to widen and straighten the channel and build new locks. The project will expand researchers’ understanding of global changes that occurred when the Isthmus of Panama formed, creating a land bridge between North America and South America.

The five-year grants emphasize the importance of international cooperation in research and education projects. The Florida Museum and College of Engineering hope to build long- lasting partnerships with their international counterparts that could lead to work on future projects.

“An important outcome is the generation of globally sensitive, globally educated, 21st century students,” said Ranga Narayanan, College of Engineering professor and distinguished teacher-scholar and principal investigator for the engineering grant.

The engineering project is the first NSF international research and education grant on multiphase fluid mechanics, which studies fluid behavior and motion when a liquid interacts with another liquid, solid or gas. The study will examine flow patterns and instabilities in fluids, why those patterns occur and how they may be controlled.

“Virtually everything you see around you that is manufactured is affected by multiphase flows,” Narayanan said. “Take for example the semi-conductor chips in your computer or the potato chips that you like to munch on.”

The research has potential applications for many industries, including space exploration, drug delivery, energy production and materials processing, with an economic impact of tens of billions of dollars annually, Narayanan said.

Jones described the museum program as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity because of the large amount of sediment being exposed during the Panama Canal construction project, and the fossil record those sediments contain.

“The marine connection between the Atlantic and Pacific was severed simultaneously with the rise of the Panama Isthmus, changing oceanic circulation and ushering in a new climate regime affecting the entire planet.” Jones said. “Sediments also record the evolution of tropical biodiversity as well as the mixing of faunas and floras in Central America as they migrated from North and South America.”

Of the 500 institutions that applied, 83 were invited to submit full proposals, and 15 projects received funding. NSF has not announced the other institution to receive two grants.

The Florida Museum is partnering with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institution, Panama; the New Mexico Museum of Natural History; Florida State University, Panama Canal Campus; Biomuseo, Panama; Universidad de Panama; Sociedad Mastozoologica de Panama; and Autoridad del Canal de Panama for the project.

“It’s a cooperative effort among institutions to learn about the paleontology of Panama and educate people both in Panama and the U.S.,” said Gary Morgan, curator of paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and co-investigator on the museum grant.

Researchers and students also will develop a museum exhibit based on the findings.

“We envision a 1,000-square-foot, bilingual traveling exhibit tentatively called ‘Panama Canal Discoveries,’ ” Jones said. “It will feature some of the interesting fossil discoveries from the project and provide context to the significance and implications of these fossils.”

The College of Engineering is partnering with Florida State University, five French universities and five Japanese institutions. The French partners are the universities of Paris, Lille, Poitiers, Marseille and Toulouse. The Japanese institutions include the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the University of Tokyo, Tokyo University of Science, Kyoto University and Tohoku University.

Nanowires are so tiny that a human hair would dwarf them — some have diameters 150 billionths of a meter. Because of their small size, surface tension that occurs during the manufacturing process pulls them together, limiting their usefulness. This is a problem because the wires are seen as a potential core element of new and more powerful microelectronics, solar cells, batteries and medical tools.

But in a paper in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces now online, a University of Florida engineering researcher says he has found an inexpensive solution.

Kirk Ziegler, an assistant professor of chemical engineering, said nanowires are most often made today with a process that involves the immersion of the wires.

When complete, each wire is supposed to poke up right next to the other from a flat surface, like bristles on a Lilliputian toothbrush. But Ziegler said the wires are so tiny and so flexible that surface tension clumps them up when dried.

Manufacturers use extremely high pressure to reduce the surface tension, but Ziegler said that process is difficult, expensive and not conducive to large-scale production.

Ziegler and Justin Hill, who will graduate from UF with a doctorate in chemical engineering this summer, realized that they needed to introduce a force that counteracted that of the surface tension. They came up with a process simple enough to be achievable with a nine-volt battery. The researchers apply an electrical charge to the nanostructures during the manufacturing process, charging each tiny wire and making it repel its neighbor.

“As the two nanowires pull toward each other because of the surface tension, the like charges at the tips act to push them apart,” Ziegler said. “The aim is to get a net zero force on the structure, so the nanowires stand straight.”

Tests of microscope-slide-sized surfaces, each containing trillions of nanowires, showed that the procedure effectively prevents clumping, Ziegler said.

Nanowires have not found wide commercial applications to date, but Ziegler said that as engineers learn how to make and manipulate them, they could underpin far more efficient solar cells and batteries because they provide more surface area and better electrical properties.

“Being able to pack in a higher density of nanowires gives you a much higher surface area, so you start to generate higher energy density,” he said.

Ziegler said that biomedical engineers are also interested in using the wires to help deliver drugs to individual cells, or to hinder or encourage individual cell growth. The University of Florida has applied for a patent on the process, he added.