News / Features / October 19, 2022

Kaiyu Guan Charts the Course from Blue Waters to Delta

With goals to monitor, model, and optimize farmland, Kaiyu Guan uses his supercomputing experience with Blue Waters to tackle cutting-edge processing with Delta.

Kaiyu Guan is a researcher with lofty goals – he hopes to monitor, model and ultimately optimize every farmland. Guan aims to achieve these goals in the coming decade or so. He’s a researcher with a mission; of helping create tools so farmers can check on and manage their crops – every single field – in real-time to maintain a healthy and productive growth cycle. But simply reaching that goal isn’t enough. Guan also hopes to achieve co-sustainability of environment quality and food security. It’s quite the task, and he’s been using the supercomputing resources at NCSA to tackle the issues surrounding both aspects of his mission, one piece of research at a time. He’s also in the unique position of being one of the researchers at UIUC who’s had experience using NCSA’s retired supercomputer, Blue Waters, and its new cutting-edge GPU-processing resource, Delta.  

Read more about Blue waters here.

About the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC): The Agroecosystem Sustainability Center was founded in 2021 to lead global efforts in harmonizing sustainable food production with thriving ecosystems. The Center strives to revolutionize agricultural systems through research, collaboration, and engagement, bridging science and practice for agricultural productivity and ecosystem sustainability. Centered in the heart of Midwest on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign under the umbrella of both the College of Agriculture, and Environmental Sciences (ACES) and the Institute of Sustainability, Energy, and the Environment (iSEE), ASC is positioned at the critical intersection of academia, industry, policy, and on-the-ground practice. ASC is creating a diverse and dynamic hub for driving change and is committed to transforming its research into practical and scalable solutions, fortifying our ecosystems, bolstering farm profitability, and empowering agricultural systems to proactively mitigate and adapt to the realities of climate change.

Media Contact: Mike Koon, ASC Communication Lead (mkoon@illinois.edu)