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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO - The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is part of a national team of academic institutions and industry partners that was awarded a $108 million contract to work side-by-side with Department of Defense (DoD) researchers in 11 technical areas with broad scientific and defense applications. Led by Mississippi State University, the Ohio Supercomputer Center, and SDSC, the consortium will begin contract work on June 1, 2001, with a three-year basic contract and up to five one-year extension options.

The Programming Environment and Training (PET) consortium will work with the DoD's High Performance Computing Modernization Program to provide research expertise, education and training, and technical support for computing resources. SDSC researchers will be leading efforts in education, outreach and training (EOT) and enabling technologies.

"We are very excited about winning this award. We have enjoyed working with DoD researchers over the past few years, and this award ensures that our team will play a very large role in working with them to push scientific and technology frontiers for the next eight years," said Jay Boisseau, a co-PI on the proposal and the associate director for Scientific Computing at SDSC. "This award represents proof of our team's past successes and also DoD's confidence in our abilities to contribute world-class computational expertise to leading-edge scientific research."

The contract is one of the largest in DoD history for academic research and builds on SDSC's involvement over the past five years with the PET program of the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVO) Major Shared Resource Center. The new consortium will work with the Army Engineering Research and Development Center at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and the Air Force Aeronautical Systems Center in Dayton, Ohio, as well as NAVO.

Reagan Moore of SDSC will be leading Enabling Technologies activities for the team. Don Frederick of SDSC will be leading the EOT effort by organizing workshops and training classes, including distance learning, on topics of interest to DoD scientists, such as parallelization of codes and access grid technologies. "Our role is to promote research and support for the DoD users both at DoD sites and at distributed sites around the country," Frederick said.

The computational areas targeted by the PET program include climate, weather, and ocean modeling, and computational fluid dynamics. Using high-performance computers to simulate the Earth's climate has applications in flight safety, search and rescue planning, and submarine warfare, among other areas. In the computational fluid dynamics area, supercomputers are used to model fluid and gas flows around aircraft, missiles, and submarines, for example, or flow in air circulation systems or the human circulatory system.

Led by project director Joe Thompson of Mississippi State, the consortium also includes researchers from Ohio State University, Florida State University, the University of Illinois, the University of Texas, the University of Tennessee, Jackson State University in Mississippi, Clark Atlanta University, Florida International University, the University of Hawaii, and Central State University in Ohio. Industry partners that will subcontract to help with the project are Computer Sciences Corporation and SAIC.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is a research unit of the University of California, San Diego, and the leading-edge site of the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (http://www.npaci.edu/). SDSC is sponsored by the National Science Foundation through NPACI and by other federal agencies, the State and University of California, and private organizations. For additional information about SDSC see http://www.sdsc.edu/ or contact David Hart at SDSC, 858-534-8314, dhart@sdsc.edu.

More information on the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program may be found on line at http://www.hpcmo.hpc.mil/.