LSU Center for Computation & Technology to Feature 'Green' Booth, University Research at Supercomputing 2009 in Portland, Oregon

Researchers from LSU’s Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, will present University research enabled through high-performance computing systems, high-speed networking, advanced software and innovative computational applications during the annual Supercomputing Conference, Nov. 14-20 in Portland, Oregon.

CCT will host a booth during the exhibition portion of the conference, Nov. 16-19, to show different projects underway in departments across LSU that use supercomputing to develop solutions for real-world problems. 

Supercomputing 2009, the premier international conference on high-performance computing and its related tools, technologies and applications, is a “green” conference, so CCT will have a sustainable booth, distributing information electronically and displaying reusable posters that describe major research projects CCT faculty led in the past year. 

The booth has a digital screen and video-on-demand setup to show short movies of LSU research conducted through high-performance computing. Famper, a creation of the LSU Robotics Research Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science, will be in the CCT booth.  Famper is a small robot designed to climb through pipelines and remotely send back data. During SC, visitors can watch Famper crawl through pipes and send back live video. 

The booth also will feature information on the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative, or LONI, and its contributions to TeraGrid in the past year. TeraGrid incorporates supercomputing resources from 11 partner sites around the country, including LONI, a high-speed, fiber optic network that connects supercomputing resources among Louisiana’s major research institutions. As a TeraGrid partner, LONI has furthered research in various disciplines at other universities and national laboratories. 

In other areas of the conference, CCT IT Researcher Steve Brandt will display his “Datacenter of the Future” project in the SC 2009 exhibition, and CCT Research Analyst Andrei Hutanu will make a presentation on network-aware visualization at the SC Ultrascale Visualization Workshop, discussing how high-speed networks such as LONI can help researchers process large data sets quickly and effectively. 

“Supercomputing Conference not only highlights the innovative research taking place at LSU, it gives us an opportunity to collaborate with top computational scientists from around the world and learn new ways to apply emerging technologies and software to solve real-world problems in everything from biology and physics to music and the arts,” said CCT Interim Director Stephen David Beck.