News & Publications

Feb. 13, 2020

Designing safety restraints for a spacecraft is much more difficult than designing them for automobiles. Injuries that are tolerable after a car crash can prevent an astronaut from exiting a capsule that’s just landed in the water. Also, unlike in a car, impacts are far more likely to come from any direction. Since an Earthward-bound spacecraft crashes every time—each Earth landing is actually a crash—NASA has adopted an extremely low-tolerance policy toward even minor injuries.

16th Annual HPCwire Awards Given to Leaders in the Global HPC Community

Nov. 18, 2019

For the 10th year, PSC has been recognized in the annual HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards. HPCwire, the leading trade publication in the high-performance computing (HPC) community presented the awards at the 2019 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC19), in Denver, Colorado. The awards recognize achievements among the top academic and business leaders in the global HPC community. The list of winners were revealed at the SC19 HPCwire booth, and on the HPCwire website.

 Oct. 17, 2019

Shawn Brown has been selected as the next director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), a joint research center of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Brown, whose work uses high performance computing, informatics and computational modeling to advance research in scientific fields, including neuroscience and public health, will join PSC on Nov. 27.

HuBMAP Consortium Charts out Goals for Navigable 3D Map in Article in Nature

Oct. 9, 2019

A national collaboration of scientists has taken the first steps to creating a 3D map of the human body, down to the level of single cells and smaller. In an article in the prestigious journal Nature, the Human Biomolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) Consortium charts out its goals for creating an interactive map that scientists can use to navigate through the human body to answer questions about its functions in health and disease. HuBMAP will continue over the next four years with an anticipated total of $54 million in grants, pending availability of resources, from the NIH Common Fund over the lifespan of the program.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and the University of Pittsburgh are playing leading roles in the consortium.

Fresh Five-Year Funding Ensures Continued Cybersecurity Support of NSF Research by PSC and Collaborators

Sept. 19, 2019

The National Science Foundation has awarded Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, a $12.5 million renewal grant to extend the center through 2024. The Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research is the lead organization for the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, in collaboration with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Internet2 and the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Over the past seven years, Trusted CI pioneered and set the standard for the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence through continuous innovation in cybersecurity, and cultivating the NSF community's trust in Trusted CI as a partner and a leader. Thus far, Trusted CI has helped over 250 projects improve their strength in cybersecurity. In addition to work toward a comprehensive cybersecurity framework, Trusted CI will initiate an innovative training program in 2020. Working with regional networks throughout the country, Trusted CI will train a wide range of people in cybersecurity skills to protect national research endeavors.

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July 16, 2019

Artificial intelligence (AI) research took a big step forward when a CMU AI program overcame the world’s best professional players in a series of six-player poker games. Developed at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, the Pluribus program runs on PSC’s Bridges system.

$10-Million System Will Expand National Capacity for Coupled HPC, AI and Data and Serve Nontraditional and Traditional High-Performance-Computing Communities

July 9, 2019

A $10-million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) is funding a new supercomputer at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), a joint research center of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. In partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), PSC will deploy Bridges-2, a system designed to provide researchers in Pennsylvania and the nation with massive computational capacity and the flexibility to adapt to the rapidly evolving field of data- and computation-intensive research. Bridges-2 will be available at no cost for research and education, and at cost-recovery rates for other purposes.

Machine Learning Enables Scientists to Spot "Comma-Shaped Clouds"

July 2, 2019

Meteorologists can get time-critical help in spotting dangerous cloud formations using artificial intelligence (AI), according to scientists at Penn State and AccuWeather Inc. The team trained an AI with the “machine learning” method, running on PSC’s Bridges system, to recognize a typical cloud formation known as comma-shaped clouds in satellite images. Their results detected up to 99 percent of the comma-shaped clouds and 64 percent of ensuing storms in 2011 and 2012 satellite images over the U.S. Their hope is to develop an accurate early warning system so storm warnings can be issued more quickly than possible today.

Read more.

Read the Penn State release.