Segee named Campus Champion for national science, engineering program

Bruce Segee, the Henry R. and Grace V. Butler Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maine, has been named a Campus Champion by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE).

With Segee’s inclusion, the Campus Champions program, a collaborative effort between XSEDE and campus representatives to promote the use of cyberinfrastructure in education and research, has reached two new benchmarks: 200 institutions across the United States now participate in the program and all 50 states and all EPSCoR jurisdictions (except Guam) are now represented, according to an XSEDE news release.

Segee’s research focuses on instrumentation, industrial automation and computer control of machinery. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in microprogramming, computer architecture, hardware applications of C, and industrial computer control, according to the release.

“HPC [High-performance computing] resources are sort of like a car engine: Researchers should have access to good ones, but the vast majority should not be installing and maintaining their own systems in order to move their research forward,” said Segee, who also is the director of the Advanced Computing Group for the University of Maine System. “XSEDE can act as the ‘mechanic’ in this way. The vast majority of research that uses supercomputers isn’t research about supercomputers. XSEDE helps move the domain research forward by lowering the cyberinfrastructure barriers.”

The Campus Champions program supports campus representatives as a local source of knowledge about XSEDE, as well as other digital services, opportunities and resources. There are now 253 champions at 200 institutions.

XSEDE is a virtual system that scientists and engineers around the world can use to interactively share computing resources, data and expertise.

The full XSEDE release is online.