Khang Hoang has been named the executive director of the Center for Computationally Assisted Science and Technology (CCAST), a unit in the IT Division at NDSU. Hoang’s selection comes after a national search that garnered candidates from across the country.
Hoang received his doctorate in physics from Michigan State University. Before joining NDSU, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California–Santa Barbara and then a postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. He is an accomplished researcher in physics, chemistry and materials science and has over two decades of experience with high-performance computing.
As a scientist, Hoang is a leading expert in materials research. His work appears in high-impact scientific journals and is featured in news outlets. He is ranked among the world’s top 100,000 scientists for research impact. His interests include computational design of materials for energy storage and conversion, photonics, optoelectronics and quantum information applications.
Hoang has been serving as the CCAST interim executive director since 2023, following service in this unit as research facilitator from 2018 until 2023. As a research computing professional, he advises and trains other researchers on the applications of high-performance computing in various research fields and works to develop computing resources to meet the needs of researchers at NDSU and beyond.
The CCAST executive director is responsible for the oversight of CCAST as a service unit in support of research and education at NDSU and other North Dakota University System institutions. The center develops, manages and operates advanced research computing resources, and educates researchers on proper and efficient use of the resources and on other topics of interest to the research community.
CCAST is the largest academic supercomputing facility in the state of North Dakota. It has more than 12,000 CPU cores, nearly 100 GPUs, data storage systems totaling 10 petabytes of capacity, and rigorous training and internship programs in advanced research computing.
At NDSU, CCAST facilitates and enables research in a broad range of disciplines that spans all five colleges. Specific research topics include food, energy and water security, health, applied artificial intelligence, business analytics, genomics and bioinformatics, among many others.
