PSC System Powers Libratus, and More

Jan. 31, 2017

Watch the press conference at the Rivers Casino.

In the “Brains vs. AI” competition at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh, a CMU School of Computer Science artificial intelligence program—“AI”—called Libratus beat four of the world’s top players at heads-up, no-limit Texas hold’em poker. Libratus ran on a Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) system named Bridges to provide the vast amounts of computing and data needed to achieve this milestone.

Upgrade of PSC’s Big Data System Now in Production

Jan. 9, 2017

The Phase 2 Upgrade of the Bridges supercomputer at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has been approved by the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funded the project. The approval makes new Bridges hardware, introduced as a technical upgrade, available for research allocations to the national scientific community.

The new upgrades increase the number of nodes available on the system and expand its data storage capacity. New nodes introduced in this upgrade include two with 12 TB (terabytes) of random-access memory (RAM), 34 with 3 TB of RAM, and 32 with two NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs. The configuration of Bridges, using different types of nodes optimized for different computational tasks, represents a new step to provide powerful “heterogeneous computing” to fields that are entirely new to high-performance computing (HPC) as well as to “traditional” HPC users.

Upping The Ante: Top Poker Pros Face Off With Artificial Intelligence

20-Day Contest at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh Begins Jan. 11

Jan. 4, 2017

Four of the world’s best professional poker players will match wits with an artificial intelligence developed by Carnegie Mellon University and using PSC's Bridges system to formulate strategy. The epic rematch will determine whether a computer can beat humans playing one of the world’s toughest poker games.

In “Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence: Upping the Ante,” beginning Wednesday, Jan. 11, at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh, poker pros together will play Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold’em over 20 days with a CMU School of Computer Science computer program called Libratus.

Read the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science release.

Visit the Rivers Casino tournament Web page.

For more information, contact:

Ken Chiacchia
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
(412) 268-5869
chiacchi@psc.edu

Vivian Benton
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
(412) 268-6355

PSC Bridges and Brain Reconstruction Project Earn 2016 HPCwire Awards

Annual Awards Bestowed on Leaders in the Global High-Performance Computing Community

Nov. 14, 2016

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has received two international awards in high-performance computing. PSC was cited in the annual HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards for two projects: Its new Bridges supercomputer won “Best Data-Intensive System (End User Focused);” and its ongoing collaboration to reconstruct the microscopic architecture of the brain with Harvard University and the Allen Institute for Brain Science won “Best Use of High Performance Data Analytics.”

N.C. High School to Use Bridges for Computational Chemistry Projects

Sept. 27, 2016

The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM), a public high school for academically talented juniors and seniors from across the state, has received an allocation on PSC's Bridges system for student projects in computational chemistry.

NCSSM offers a residential program for 680 students, an online certificate program for another 350 students and summer programs for students in the 7th through 12th grades.

Read the NCSSM press release.

Bridges Supercomputer Enters Production

NSF Deems PSC’s HPC+Big Data Computational Resource Operational

Allocations Available

Aug. 31, 2016

The Bridges system at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) entered production operations last month, in support of advances in science, research, engineering, and education. Following approval by the National Science Foundation (NSF), this status change marks the transition to completing integration with other Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) compute resources, which will streamline use for the approximately 400 research projects that are already using Bridges.

XSEDE 2.0 earns $110M NSF award to expand nation’s cyberinfrastructure ecosystem

Five-year award rewards national collaboration’s success in supporting advanced computational and data-enabled research and developing the Nation's digital workforce

Aug. 23, 2016

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), of which PSC is a leading partner, has been awarded a $110 million, five-year National Science Foundation (NSF) award to continue expanding access of advanced cyberinfrastructure resources to the nation’s scientists and engineers. The award announced today provides a continuity of services valuable to its large user community, in particular the coordination of resources and people that make the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem so effective.

Grable Grant Will Fund BEST, PSC’s STEM Secondary Education Program

Aug. 1, 2016

High school teachers in southwest Pennsylvania will get training in advanced computing technologies in the biological sciences—bioinformatics—thanks to a $10,000 grant from the Grable Foundation to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC). The grant will fund PSC’s BEST (Bioinformatics Education for STudents) program, including a summer workshop for regional science teachers.

“The Grable Foundation is committed to helping young people succeed,” says D’Ann Swanson, Senior Program Officer at The Grable Foundation. “If school districts can expand their course offerings to include groundbreaking topics such as bioinformatics, it will give the region’s youth a real advantage when it comes to post-secondary learning and career options.”