INDUSTRY

GridChem partners today announced their participation in SC/06, an annual weeklong international conference for high performance computing (HPC) and networking. The group will showcase its Computational Chemistry Grid (CCG) during the conference slated for November 11-17 at the Tampa Convention Center in Florida. GridChem’s CCG is a virtual organization that provides access to HPC resources for computational chemistry with distributed support and services and intuitive interfaces. The CCG client, GridChem, is a Java desktop application that provides an interface to integrate the hardware, software and middleware resources necessary to solve quantum chemistry problems using grid technologies (see its Web site. At SC/06, GridChem will be hosting a Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) meeting on Wednesday, November 15, 2006, 12:15 pm-1:15 p.m., in rooms 1-2 of the Tampa Convention Center. Entitled “Cyberinfrastructure and Education,” the BOF will host a panel of experts who will talk about the critical role of cyberinfrastructure in the educational arena. Panelists include Thom Dunning, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA); Steve Gordon, Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC); Scott Lathrop, Argonne National Lab; and Thanh Truong, University of Utah. The BOF panelists will address topics such as: Using the CCG in Undergraduate/Graduate Education, Education's Role in Cyberinfrastructures, Cyberinfrastructures and On-line Education (The Ralph Regula School of Computational Science. This discussion will benefit educators, software developers, and those involved with cyberinfrastructure. “We are looking forward to showing the international high performance computing world the great things that GridChem has accomplished in the last year,” said John Connolly, GridChem principle investigator and director of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Computational Sciences. “We are proud of what our chemistry cyberinfrastructure has done for the chemistry community, and we are finding connections with other scientific communities, as well. International conferences, like Supercomputing, provide exciting opportunities to bridge geography and disciplines,” he added. In addition to moderating the BOF, GridChem partners will host booths, distribute CCG materials and giveaways, and provide demonstrations and talks featuring the CCG client, middleware, and interfaces. GridChem partners include the Center for Computational Sciences/University of Kentucky, Center for Computation and Technology/Louisiana State University, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)/University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, OSC/OSU, and Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)/University of Texas. This project is supported by the National Science Foundation NMI Program under Award #04-38312.