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USF grad student wins big at GPU Symposium
[09.27.2010]

TAMPA, Fla.-- USF graduate Jon Belof, Ph.D., won the "Best Talk" award at the GPU Symposium at the Fall 2010 National Meeting of the American Chemical Society.

The two-day conference in Boston, held twice a year, featured speakers who talked about their own research regarding science and chemistry.

"I was really honored to be chosen to receive the award," Belof said.

Belof, a chemistry graduate student from 2005-2010, won the prestigious "Best Talk" award after presenting research he had done while at USF. His talk, titled "Solving Many Body Field Equations of a Point Induced Dipole Potential on Graphics Processing Units," featured his findings on using Graphics Processing Units to produce scientific calculations that will help improve hydrogen storage technologies.

Graphic Processing Units, also known as GPUs, are devices found in gaming systems such as Xbox.

Belof's research is important because it surrounds the idea of eventually replacing gasoline with hydrogen in vehicles. As a Ph.D. student, Belof helped to design hydrogen storage nanomaterials, a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Upon receiving the award, Belof also was given a NVidia Fermi card, a type of GPU. The NVidia GPU technology allows scientists to greatly speed up the amount of time taken by scientific computations by as much as 30 times.

Belof decided to give back to USF.

"I really wanted to donate the NVidia prize to Dr. Brian Space's lab at USF, because I am really grateful to USF for giving me a fantastic experience as a grad student," Belof said. ,/p>

Brian Space, a USF chemistry professor, taught Belof during his graduate studies.

"Jon is the whole package as a chemical professional with an bright and unbounded future," Space said.

Belof now works at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where he is researching materials in support of hydrogen fusion studies taking place using the National Ignition Facility.

-USF-

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Author: Amanda Stone
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