UT Metroplex Days – UT Arlington tour sites

High-Performance Computing Cluster

The Distributed and Parallel Computing Cluster is a center for interdisciplinary research, developed with a major research instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation. The project is a collaboration of the Computer Science & Engineering and Physics departments at UTA and the Dermatology Group at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. Phase I of the three-year, $1,357,000 project created a distributed-memory cluster system with 200+ processors linked to enormous amounts of storage – in the hundreds of terabytes (1012). Phase II of the project added a shared memory multi-processor system and several terabytes of additional storage, enabling the system to handle the requests for service received from other departments. Both distributed-memory and shared-memory systems are needed as they serve different applications needed by the various research groups to solve problems that cannot be solved on individual or a small number of computers. 

Nanotechnology Research & Teaching Facility

The Nanofabrication Research and Teaching Facility (NanoFab) hosts interdisciplinary research activities, primarily involving several College of Engineering and College of Science units, plus researchers from local universities and area electronics industries. The 35,000 sq. ft., two-story building contains a variety of specialized research and teaching sections. The 6,000+ sq. ft., Class 1000 main clean room is separated into areas for materials deposition, characterization and processing, photolithography, and teaching. An additional 4,800+ sq. ft. of space is devoted to laboratories containing specialized equipment and/or testing facilities. Renovations in 2005 valued at $4.6 million included the addition of three labs to accommodate an SEM, an STM and an E-Beam writer, plus two wet chemical labs, two optoelectronics labs, a nano-giga electronics lab, a cryoelectronics lab and a nano-device lab.

“Lab-on-a-chip” Embossing Process

Two pieces of equipment will be presented: a Femtosecond Laser Micro-machining (FLM) system and a Hot Embossing, Micro-replication, Micro-fabrication (HEMM) system. Current work focuses on the automated motion commands from a CAD system, and identification of process parameters for surface micro-machining on silicon and PMMA substrates and for internal micro-machining on transparent media – PMMA and glass. The process parameters for quality micro-replications of silicon molds on PMMA substrates are under way, and finite element models that describe the viscoelastic behavior of the PMMA are under development.
Potential applications include controlled drug delivery and single-use medical tests.