10/13/2009

CAAM grad student wins Ken Kennedy-Cray Inc. Graduate Fellowship Award

BY DWIGHT DANIELS
Special to the Rice News

Igor Terentyev, a doctoral student in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics, has won the Ken Kennedy-Cray Inc. Graduate Fellowship Award for 2009.

The award, managed by the Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice, supports graduate students involved in high-performance computing. It was established in 2007 by the supercomputer manufacturer Cray Inc. to honor the late Ken Kennedy, a Rice computing pioneer and a former Cray board member.


	IGOR TERENTYEV

Terentyev was recognized for his work in designing and building a framework for seismic simulation as part of his graduate studies over the past two years under the supervision of William Symes, the Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics.

“Igor has demonstrated an exceptional combination of mathematical and computational sophistication in his research,” Symes said in nominating Terentyev.

The professor noted that computer coding developed by his protégé has been widely acknowledged for producing detailed subsurface models and corresponding synthetic data to aid seismic researchers evaluate imaging technology used in energy exploration. Terentyev has presented the work at a number of stateside and overseas events.

A Russian, Terentyev earned a master’s degree in mathematics from Moscow State University in 2000. He began studying at Rice in 2006 and was awarded a master’s degree in applied mathematics last year. He worked as a software engineer for Schlumberger in Houston and has served internships at energy companies, ExxonMobil and Hess Corporation. He has been awarded four U.S. patents.

The Kennedy Institute for Information Technology specializes in leading and managing cross-institutional, multidisciplinary research in high-performance computing. A global leader in supercomputing, Cray provides innovative computing platforms that enable scientists and engineers in academia, government and industry to meet both existing and future computational challenges on a wide variety of applications.

-- Dwight Daniels is a science writer in the George R. Brown School of Engineering.