ACADEMIA

PITTSBURGH -- For development and implementation of LeMieux, their terascale computing system, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) is a finalist for the 2003 Computerworld Honors in Science. Hewlett-Packard nominated PSC for the award, which recognizes innovations in information technology that benefit society. "This system," said Winston Prather, vice president of the High Performance Technical Computing Division of HP, "represents a unique accomplishment in the art and science of massively parallel systems. The scale of the LeMieux system pushed the envelope of HP AlphaServer SC configurations to new levels. The node count, the interconnect, the software stack, were all stretched to pioneering limits. PSC's leadership converted this accomplishment into real scientific output across many disciplines. They have cemented a role for themselves as the lead open resource within the computational science community nationally." Funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation, LeMieux is a 3,000 processor system capable of six teraflops (six trillion calculations per second), comparable to every person on Earth doing 1,000 calculations per second with a hand-held calculator. It is the most powerful system in the United States committed solely to public research and open to all science and engineering disciplines. A case study supporting the nomination highlights research by Michael Klein and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, who used LeMieux for work that opens the way to development of anti-microbial polymers. These molecules offer great potential to reduce loss of life caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria and hospital-acquired infection, the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States. "We are extremely gratified and proud," said Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies, PSC co-scientific directors, in a joint statement, "that the computing resources developed here at PSC are being so effectively used by Mike Klein and his group to address today's real-world health care issues." More information about this research: http://www.psc.edu/science/2002/klein PSC previously won the Computerworld award for Science in 1997 for its collaboration with The Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms at the University of Oklahoma in development and testing of storm-scale weather forecasting. PSC also won in 1993, for its work in bringing high-performance computing to bear on understanding the interactions between proteins and DNA. Established in 1988, the Computerworld Honors Program is an international awards program to identify organizations whose use of information technology has been especially noteworthy for the originality of its conception, the breadth of its vision, and the significance of its benefit to society. More information: http://cwheroes.org