ACADEMIA

The National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) has announced that Phil Andrews and Jay Boisseau, two nationally recognized experts on computational and cyberinfrastructure hardware, have joined the partnership's executive committee. Andrews is director of High-End Computing at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego, and Boisseau is director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas, Austin.

Phil Andrews, director of High-End Computing at SDSC

Jay Boisseau, director of TACC at the University of Texas, Austin

NPACI, a consortium of 41 research groups, institutions, and university partners, is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide high-end computing and data-management resources to hundreds of scientists at colleges, universities, and research institutes around the country. SDSC is the leading-edge site of NPACI and TACC is one of its four resource hardware partners. The election of Andrews and Boisseau to the executive committee, the decision-making authority of NPACI, highlights the partnership's commitment to maintaining the most effective and powerful resources to meet the computational needs of the U.S. academic research community. "By any measure, Andrews and Boisseau are highly talented experts on hardware resources, and their election to the executive committee strengthens our already superb group," said Richard Moore, executive director of NPACI. "These two scientists will also help the NPACI hardware, software, and scientific applications partners play major roles in the NSF's recently announced Cyberinfrastructure Initiative, which will succeed NPACI in less than two years." NSF has announced that the NPACI program will be discontinued at the end of the 2004 fiscal year and be replaced by the Cyberinfrastructure Initiative, an ambitious five-year upgrade of its computing infrastructure, likely to begin in 2005. The initiative may invest as much as $1 billion a year to revolutionize the conduct of science and engineering research and education. Andrews received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Princeton University in 1982, and before coming to SDSC in 1997, was manager of Data Intensive Systems at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Boisseau received a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Texas, Austin in 1996, and before joining TACC, was associate director for Scientific Computing at SDSC. --Rex Graham