Subject: letter
From: kim
To: gcheng
Date: Wed, 10 Nov 93 11:18:48 EST

Gang, could you please proof read

Dear XX:

I am an Associate Director of the Northeast Parallel Architectures
Center (NPAC) at Syracuse University and have supervised Gang Cheng
for two years, first as a Graduate Research Assistant, then as
a full time permanent member of the NPAC research staff.  
Our work together supports the central mission of our center which
is to apply state of the art high-performance computing and communication
(HPCC) technologies emerging from university, industry, and laboratory research
centers to important problems in industry, education, and society in
general.  

Gang Cheng has worked closely with me in application development projects
in a number of areas -- financial modeling with Syracuse University's School
of Management, geographic information systems with the IBM Corporation,
severe weather modeling with the National Science Foundation funded
CAPS center at the University of Oklahoma, radiation cancer therapy
modeling with Loma Linda University Medical Center, and data assimilation
and climate modeling with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the
National HPCC Grand Challenge application program.  In each of these
application projects, Gang Cheng has performed excellent work as
a computational scientist.  He has unique technical expertise in
algorithm development for parallel computers, evaluation of single
instruction multiple data (SIMD) and multiple instruction multiple
data (MIMD) machine architectures, and software development issues concerning
data decomposition, load balancing, and program performance.

Large scale application development projects require integration of a 
number of computing system resources, and integration software is one
key technology.  Gang Cheng leads NPAC's application development effort using 
high-level integration software for heterogeneous computing.  Cheng has 
pioneered the successful use of integration software for interactive control 
of simulation models running on SIMD/MIMD parallel supercomputers, and network
connected clusters of high-speed workstations for applications in finance, 
computational electromagnetics, and a NASA HPCC Grand challenge application 
in data assimilation global climate modeling.

Gang Cheng's work in HPCC software integration preceded the Grand Challenge
Workshop of May 1993 in Pittsburgh where development of software integration
approaches for combining coarse and fine grain parallelism on heterogeneous
computing systems was identified as a critical research problem.  Cheng
described the results of his research in a May 1993 research panel at the
annual Application Visualization Systems conference in Orlando, Florida.
A colleague of mine who participated concluded that Cheng's work was without
question the strongest among this national panel of researchers.

Among our research staff of highly talented individuals drawn from a
national and international scope, Gang Cheng's quality of work, level of 
motivation, and professionalism is outstanding.  A good example is Cheng's
recent contribution in an October 25, 1993 public meeting of the U.S. House 
of Representatives Subcommittee on Science, Space, and Technology.
This meeting displayed the research results of a consortium of
organizations including Syracuse and Cornell Universities, the US Air Force 
Rome Laboratory, NYNEX Science and Technology Center, and related 
research organizations in New York State.  Gang Cheng produced two of the 
four interactive HPCC software demonstrations presented to the House 
Subcommittee.  These state of the art software demonstrations integrated
high-performance computer models written by Gang Cheng and ran over NYNET, a 
regional ATM based gigabit telecommunications network.  This demonstration
of capability is an example of what many in the HPCC community believe to
be an essential component to building U.S. industrial competitiveness, health
care reform, and improving our educational system.

Gang Cheng is currently working as a NPAC project leader in computational 
electromagnetics after winning the award of a research proposal in a 
highly competitive US Air Force program.  Cheng is leading the computational
science component of a team of NPAC and industry researchers from the 
Syracuse Research Corporation to develop new software for computational
electromagnetics problems on distributed memory MIMD supercomputers.

Based on this summary of my experience, and other evidence of Gang Cheng's
outstanding credentials as a Computational Scientist, I strongly recommend
him for permanent resident status which will allow him to continue 
contributing to NPAC's research and development mission to support 
economic development in New York State.

Please call me if I can answer any questions or provide additional
information.

Sincerely yours,

Kim Mills, Ph.D.
Associate Director of NPAC