CITI: 20 years of innovation

CITI: 20 years of innovation

BY PATRICK KURP
Special to the Rice News

”The impetus was provided by high-performance computing, and the time was right,” said Ken Kennedy, University Professor, the John and Ann Doerr Professor in Computational Engineering in Computer Science and professor in electrical and computer engineering.

Kennedy was referring to the Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI) and its formation 20 years ago at Rice University — exciting times, as remembered by Kennedy, CITI’s first director. In October 1986, as plans for CITI were forming, he and Sidney Burrus, now the Maxfield Oshman Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering and CITI’s second director, pitched the idea to the Advisory Council of the George R. Brown School of Engineering. Here’s what Burrus told the council members:

Phil Humnicky/the White House

Ken Kennedy, right, University Professor and the John and Ann Doerr Professor in Computational Engineering in Computer Science, is pictured with Vice President Al Gore and the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) at the White House in 1998. PITAC was established to provide President Bill Clinton, Congress and relevant federal agencies with independent advice on maintaining America’s pre-eminence in advanced information technologies.

”Pulling together this research institute you will get a group about as large as you will find in a much larger university. That, I am positive, will be a tremendous asset.”

Burrus’ bold claim proved prophetic. CITI, which has grown from the original 30 to more than

140 faculty members and research scientists spanning many disciplines, is thriving and serves as an umbrella for eight centers, including the Center for Multimedia Communication, the Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems and the Center for Excellence and Equity in Education. From its roots in computer science, electrical and computer engineering, computational and applied mathematics, and statistics, CITI now includes faculty from 17 departments and every school at Rice except Architecture and Continuing Studies.

Burrus recalled that the only cross-departmental precedent for CITI at Rice in the 1980s was the Rice Quantum Institute, where most of the research focused on physics and chemistry. Burrus and Kennedy give George Rupp, the president of Rice from 1985 to 1993, much of the credit for creating an atmosphere of enthusiasm and openness that permitted the development of such successful experiments as CITI.

”Shortly after Rupp came on, Ken and a few others had the idea of creating an institute centered on computing,” Burrus said. ”Bill Sick, Rice alumnus, board of trustees member and very successful technology leader, suggested computing and information be bundled to create CITI.”

”David Hellums, then the dean of engineering [now the A.J. Hartstook Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering], Ken, Don Johnson [the J.S. Abercrombie Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and of Statistics], I and a few others put together the internal proposal to create CITI, which Rupp and the Rice board approved,” Burrus said.

Neal Lane, now the Malcolm Gillis University Professor and senior fellow in science and technology at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, was provost when CITI was being organized.

”Ken Kennedy was the genesis, and he had a high profile as a national leader in the field,” Lane said. ”It was in some ways more attractive to federal agencies, like National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, to have proposals come from an institute that had the backing of the highest levels of the administration. The agencies wanted to be sure the whole university was committed to the project and would seek to continue the effort even after a particular grant ran out.”

CITI’s first major spin-off came in 1989, with the formation of the Center for Research on Parallel Computation. CRPC was set up with the aid of a five-year, $22.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation, placing it among the 11 original NSF Science and Technology Centers in the nation.

”That was our first big break,” Kennedy said. ”That was a financial boost, obviously, but also good for morale. Everyone was excited.” In 1992, he stepped down as CITI director, in part to allow CITI to expand its mandate beyond high-performance computing to its originally envisioned breadth.

”CPRC was the homerun that CITI hit in its early years,” Kennedy said.  Then it became the eggplant that ate Chicago. It had to move on into something else.”  By 1998, CPRC had evolved into the Center for High Performance Software Research (HiPerSoft), of which Kennedy remains director.

Burrus, who served as CITI director from 1992 to 1998, said, ”CITI does not do research. We promote research.” He also noted that CITI has been fortunate in forging many successful industrial partnerships with such companies as Texas Instruments, Hewlett Packard, National Instruments, Shell and Schlumberger. 

In 1996, CITI’s administrative offices moved into the newly completed Anne and Charles Duncan Hall, and Texas Instruments donated $7 million, largely for the digital signal processing research that had been under way with TI under CITI. In addition to its original research focus on robotics and parallel computation, CITI continued to broaden its research mandate into distributed computing, digital signal processing, telecommunications, optimization, data modeling and analysis, nanoengineering and technologies in education.

COURTESY PHOTO

Marcia O’Malley, assistant professor in mechanical engineering and materials science, right, shows Blake Birkenfeld and Gina Upperman a robotic hand developed by the Dexterous Robotics Lab at NASA Johnson Space Center. The two are undergraduates from Texas A&M and Rice, respectively, and took part in the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships in Engineering at Rice (SURFER) program co-sponsored by CITI and the Micron Foundation in 2003.

”This is further proof of Ken Kennedy’s original vision,” Lane said. ”He saw, correctly, that Rice would be better able to compete for large projects by having an institute in place. He knew it would require a place, with plenty of space, staff support, multidepartmental support and high-level support from the president, the provost and the board.”

CITI’s third director, from 1998 to 2001, was Willy Zwaenepoel, then the Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering, and now professor and dean at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

Under the CITI umbrella, Connexions, dedicated to publishing open-access scholarly content, had been founded in 1999 as a way to break down barriers between electronic and print publishing. As a nonprofit start-up launched at Rice, it aims at reinventing how textbooks are written, edited, pubished and used. Kennedy likened CITI to an ”incubator” for such new organizations.

The director of CITI since 2001 has been Moshe Vardi, the Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering. During his tenure, CITI has acquired several supercomputers, including the Rice Terascale Cluster (RTC), purchased in 2002 with a combined $2 million grant from the NSF and a grant from the Intel Corp.

In 2004, CITI acquired another supercomputer, three times faster than RTC, with another $2 million grant from the NSF. The grant was one of the largest ever awarded under the NSF’s Major Research Infrastructure program. CITI’s supercomputers provide a shared resource for the benefit of any Rice faculty whose research depends on large-scale computing.

Of CITI and its accomplishments, Vardi said: ”Ken Kennedy and his colleagues were perfect in their timing when they set up CITI. The computer revolution was exploding, things were moving very quickly, and Rice got into the field in a big way at just the right time. Today, we are the beneficiaries of Ken’s foresight.”

Since 2003, CITI has teamed with the Baker Institute for Public Policy and the vice provost and university librarian at Rice to sponsor the Technology, Society and Public Policy Lecture Series. This has augmented CITI’s Distinguished Lecture Series, which attracts speakers from industry and other universities, and the Technology, Cognition and Culture Lecture Series, co-sponsored by the Humanities Research Center, and attracts an audience from the across the campus and beyond. 

”I’m a big-picture guy,” Kennedy said, ”and the big picture for CITI began with high-performance computing. That’s what we set out to do initially, and I think that’s the first legacy we created. But CITI is much broader and it has generated