INDUSTRY

Apple and LSU's Center for Computation & Technology (CCT) are co-sponsoring the official launch of Nemeaux, the newest addition to CCT's collection of high performance computers. Unveiled today at a public reception, Nemeaux is a cluster of 24 Xserve G5s, which will be used for creative and research projects in the computational arts, as well as in scientific computing. Purchased with a $114,000 grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents, Nemeaux is the only cluster of its kind devoted to computational arts research. "Nemeaux provides a platform for scientists and artists to explore new possibilities," said Stephen David Beck, director of the Laboratory for Creative Arts & Technologies, a division of CCT, and professor of composition and computer music." LSU says that researchers in LCAT will benefit from Nemeaux's ability to link art and technology for creative and research projects. It will be used for video composition and animation rendering, which translates a set of computer data and virtual objects into a full visual representation of those objects. Nemeaux will also serve as a research tool for the computational aspects of music, film, video and art. Nemeaux is currently serving as a test-bed for CCT's Cactus Framework and Apple's Xgrid, two applications designed for Grid Computing. Researchers are developing tools to perform distributed audio rendering on the cluster, using multiple computers to analyze, process and generate sound. Although Nemeaux's focus will remain in the computational arts, it will be employed to explore problems in numerical relativity, fluid dynamics and scientific visualization. Nemeaux will become part of CCT's "garden of computational architectures" and be used along side CCT's two other high performance computers as a collection of supercomputing clusters targeted at specific tasks and disciplines, according to Beck. The Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, at LSU is an interdisciplinary research environment for advancing computational sciences, technologies, and the disciplines they touch. The center's efforts are funded largely by the Louisiana Legislature's Information Technology Initiative.