Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Contracts for SGI Shared Memory Systems

PITTSBURGH, January 16, 2008 - The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has contracted with SGI (NASDAQ: SGIC) to acquire two SGI® Altix® 4700 systems. One of the new systems (768 processors, 1.5 terabytes of memory, 5.0 teraflops peak performance) will be integrated into the TeraGrid, the National Science Foundation program of comprehensive cyberinfrastructure, substantially increasing the "shared memory" capability available through NSF for U.S. science and engineering research.

Buckyball Bowling with BigBen and Wiimo in Reno

PSC scientists adapt the Wii remote controller to steered molecular dynamics.

PITTSBURGH, December 4, 2007 - At Supercomputing '07 in Reno, Nevada, Nov. 10-16, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) attracted attention at its booth with an innovative hybrid of game technology and supercomputing. PSC scientists Shawn T. Brown and Philip Blood along with student intern Jordan Soyke adapted the Wii motion-sensing controller (the WiiMote) from the Wii (pronounced "we"), Nintendo's popular game product, as a controller for molecular dynamics (MD) simulations running on BigBen, PSC's 4,000 processor, 21-teraflop Cray XT3 supercomputing system.