News & Publications

Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Upgrades Bandwidth and Connectivity in West Virginia

PSC collaboration with WVU, WVNET and federal research facilities transforms West Virginia network landscape.

PITTSBURGH, June 5, 2012 — The Three Rivers Optical Exchange (3ROX), the high-performance Internet hub operated and managed by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), has significantly upgraded the link between PSC and West Virginia University (WVU). At the same time, WVNET (West Virginia Network), a network organization that serves schools, government and non-profits in West Virginia, has joined 3ROX, which gives West Virginia clients of WVNET a significant bandwidth upgrade as well as access to expanded research and education resources.

PSC Provides Direct Link from Galaxy to the XSEDE Backbone

PITTSBURGH, May 29, 2012 — Mountains of genomics data that had to work their way through a bottleneck of network connections now have a direct, high-speed link to the world’s most powerful data-processing resources — thanks to network engineering at the Three Rivers Optical Exchange (3ROX).

3ROX, a high-performance Internet hub operated and managed by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), has put into place a high-bandwidth link from Galaxy, a data-intensive bioinformatics program at Penn State, to the network backbone of the National Science Foundation’s XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) program. This link opens the high-performance computing (HPC) resources of XSEDE to a research community that has not traditionally been a big user of HPC but, with emerging genomics technologies, will benefit greatly from using it.

Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Scientist Participates in $.87M Study of Next-Generation Advanced Reactor

PITTSBURGH, May 23, 2012 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) awarded a three-year $875,000 grant for a team of Pittsburgh scientists, including Anirban Jana of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), to develop computational models for turbulent mixing in the VHTR (Very High Temperature Reactor), a Generation IV nuclear reactor.

Generation IV reactors offer significant advances in sustainability, safety, reliability and economics. Their designs are currently undergoing study through the Generation IV International Forum (GIF), comprised of 12 countries including the United States, and are expected to be available commercially after 2030.

XSEDE's Extended Collaborative Support program shares insights via symposium series

Talks open to all with slides and audio posted on YouTube

When the subject is data from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), the sky's the limit. The LSST, which will house the world's largest camera, perched on a mountaintop in northern Chile, has as a goal detecting signatures of dark energy and dark matter. The challenge of what to do with the coming torrent of data from the LSST was the first topic in a new symposium series from XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment), the National Science Foundation cyberinfrastructure program.

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With Shared Memory in Pittsburgh, XSEDE Expands Horizons for HPC Research

PITTSBURGH, March 29, 2012— Times are changing for HPC (high-performance computing) research, as non-traditional fields of study have begun taking advantage of powerful HPC tools. This was part of the plan when the National Science Foundation’s XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) program launched in July 2011. In recent months, the program took big steps toward this objective, in that a number of non-traditional projects — the common denominator being the need to process and analyze large amounts of data — were awarded peer-reviewed allocations of time on XSEDE resources.

Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Provides “Low-Tech” Access to World-Class Health Resources

PSC team does “makeover” for world-health repository at University of Pittsburgh

PITTSBURGH, March 7, 2012— It was not the usual sort of challenge for supercomputing — make a database operate at low bandwidth. And make the website interface more attractive.

With low-tech as the watchword, a team at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) took on the task of updating Supercourse, a web-based repository of lectures by leading scientists and educators world-wide. An invaluable resource for many, Supercourse provides some of the best available information on how to practice preventive medicine around the world. Produced at the World Health Organization Collaborating Center University of Pittsburgh, Supercourse serves a network of over 56,000 scientists in 174 countries, who through it gain access to a free library of 5,100 lectures in 31 languages.

Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and Drexel Light High-Performance Cross-State Link

PITTSBURGH, January 30, 2012— The Three Rivers Optical Exchange (3ROX), the high-performance Internet hub operated and managed by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), and Drexel University in Philadelphia are now directly connected via high-performance, fiber-optic network. They have connected via the FrameNet service of National LambdaRail (NLR), a non-profit organization that links more than 280 U.S. universities and private and government laboratories.

Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Collaborates with SGI on Shared-Memory Enhancements

PITTSBURGH, November 29, 2011— The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) acquired an SGI® UV1000 in July 2010 with help from an award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Named Blacklight, this system has 32 terabytes of memory partitioned into two connected 16-terabyte shared-memory nodes, in effect, the two largest shared-memory systems in the world. With certain programming approaches, furthermore, such as message-passing and partitioned global address space (PGAS), researchers can access all 32 terabytes as a single memory space.