UW Botanist Harnesses the Grid to Illuminate Crop Growth
Friday, February 6, 2015 - 12:00
in Mathematics & Economics
When Edgar Spalding crunches data on Wisconsin corn, the numbers boggle the mind. Four million acres are planted annually, with 30,000 seeds planted per acre, producing about 120 billion seedlings sprouting skyward each May. With help from the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC), Spalding is applying this astronomical sense of scale to our understanding of corn. Spalding uses the HTC capabilities pioneered by Miron Livny, Morgridge Institute for Research chief technology officer, to quantify the incredibly complex process of corn growth from seed to vigorous seedling -- not just one at a time, but over thousands of samples.