APPLICATIONS

PITTSBURGH -- LeMieux is the name given to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's terascale computing system, established through an August 2000 grant from the National Science Foundation to advance scientific and engineering research in the United States. At SC2002, the 15th annual conference on high-performance computing and networking, in Baltimore Nov. 16-22, several researchers who use LeMieux were recognized for their scientific achievement. The SC2002 award for Best Technical Paper honored computational methods work done using LeMieux which included a run of three hours using 2,048 processors. The paper, titled "Parallel Multiscale Gauss-Newton-Krylov Methods for Inverse Wave Propagation," grew out of large-scale earthquake simulation work at PSC and was written by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and New York University. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign won a Gordon Bell prize for "special accomplishment" for a paper describing a software approach, called NAMD, that renders an atom-by-atom blueprint of large biomolecules and biomolecular systems. This program has "scaled" effectively to over 2,000 processors on LeMieux, meaning that it exploits the "parallelism" of thousands of processors with very high efficiency. Other award-winning projects at SC2002 also employed LeMieux as part of collaborations to demonstrate "grid" capabilities that link many different systems together. LeMieux participated in projects that received a "Bandwidth Challenge Award" and "High Performance Computing Challenge Awards" for "the most geographically distributed application" and for "the most heterogeneous set of platforms." SC2002 also marked release of the latest Top500 listing, showing that LeMieux is the most powerful system in the United States committed to public research. This listing , which ranks the 500 most powerful computers in the world, was made public on November 15th, with the opening of SC2002. It places LeMieux 6th overall with the only faster U.S. systems at classified facilities. The PSC system is available for science and engineering research on a peer-review basis, with scientific findings openly published. The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh together with Westinghouse Electric Company. It was established in 1986 and is supported by several federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and private industry.