Press Releases

April 22, 2002
Southampton College Professor Recognized as an Apple OS X Developer

Gaurav Khanna's Software Aids Scientific Research from Cell Biology to Black Holes

Contact:
Darren Johnson (PR@southampton.liu.edu)
(631) 287 8313
Fax: (631) 283 4081

Apple Computers recently honored Southampton College mathematics professor Gaurav Khanna with their Recognition Award, naming him an official developer for their new OS X operating system.

Dr. Khanna, an expert in astrophysics, has not only created new software to aid in the study of some of his favorite topics, including black hole collisions and galaxy evolution, but also programs that help researchers in a wide range of other scientific subjects, from molecular biology to electrical engineering. Khanna was also invited by Apple's Science & Technology Markets division to serve as an advisor for Distributed Computing. Apple is currently featuring Khanna on their website (http://www.apple.com/scitech/news/), which is a rare achievement for a software developer.

"Among scientists, these programs are becoming very popular," Khanna said. "My programs are downloaded an average of once every 10 minutes; all from people at universities and research institutions."

Khanna uses his software to actively research various aspects of theoretical and computational astrophysics. As for his programming work, Khanna said that Apple's new OS X, in combination with a desktop G4 computer, gives the scientific community the needed mathematical power, through parallel and vector processing, that previously was only found in supercomputers. Khanna's programs unleash this ability.

"The future of scientific computing lies in the parallel and vector computation that Apple's newest systems allow," Khanna said. "Top research institutions already have similar workstation clusters for their high performance computing tasks. This clearly indicates how important and commonplace such computation will be in the future. Our goal as programmers is to be at the edge of this new, exciting technology, and help it reach its potential."

Khanna maintains collaborations with and support from various institutions worldwide, including Penn State University, Louisiana State University, University of Utah and Albert-Einstein-Institute at MPG Golm, Germany. Khanna earned a Ph.D. in Gravitational Physics from Penn State and teaches calculus at Southampton College. He lives in Hampton Bays with his wife April and daughters Sarah and Rachel.