News

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) have organized a Birds of a Feather session for Tuesday, November 13, at SC2001 in Denver on "Terascale Computing and You."

Through its Terascale Computing System (TCS) and TeraGrid awards, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is providing computing infrastructure on an unprecedented scale to the nation's research community. This BOF session has been organized to encourage and assist those researchers who might benefit from this computational capability to scale up their applications and requests for time.

The NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program provides a range of terascale resources for the most demanding scientific problems. NPACI's Blue Horizon at SDSC became available in April 2000, initially providing 1 teraflops of computing performance and now upgraded to 1.7 teraflops. In July 2001, the 1-teraflops IA-32 Linux cluster at NCSA, Platinum, was made available.

In October 2001, the 6-teraflops TCS was installed at PSC. This system, the most powerful in the world committed to unclassified research, will become available as a PACI resource in January 2002. The TCS will be followed by a second IA-64 Linux cluster, Titan, at NCSA, affording 1 teraflops of compute capability. The TeraGrid, a joint project of NCSA, SDSC, Caltech, and Argonne National Laboratory, will provide a total of 13.6 teraflops and 650 terabytes of online disk storage connected by a 40-gigabit-per-second network backbone to the nation's research community by 2003.

Hosted by Bob Stock of PSC, Stuart Johnson of SDSC, and John Towns of NCSA in conjunction with NSF, this BOF will help researchers learn more about these NSF-sponsored terascale initiatives. Attendees will have an opportunity to meet with NSF staff, center staff, and current or potential users to see how they might use the terascale infrastructure in their computational science or computer science research. Other participants at the BOF will include computational scientists with various levels of experience.

The "Terascale Computing and You" BOF will be held Tuesday, November 13, at 6:30 p.m. in room C111 at the Denver Convention Center. For more information contact Stuart Johnson, sjohnson@sdsc.edu; John Towns, jtowns@ncsa.uiuc.edu; or Bob Stock, stock@psc.edu.

Please visit http://www.paci.org/ for more information on the large-scale computing facilities provided through the NSF PACI program.

About PACI

The National Science Foundation's Division of Advanced Computational Infrastructure and Research (ACIR) provides to the national scientific user community support for and access to high-end computing infrastructure and research through its Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program. The more than 20 systems offered through the two national partnerships - the National Computational Science Alliance (http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/) and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (http://www.npaci.edu/) - and the Terascale Computing System at PSC (http://www.psc.edu/) represent an unprecedented level of computational capability provided to the American research community.

Contact:

Stuart Johnson, sjohnson@sdsc.edu

John Towns, jtowns@ncsa.uiuc.edu

Bob Stock, stock@psc.edu