PSC to Play role in Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub

Monday, Nov. 2, 2015

Today, the National Science Foundation announced the funding of four regional Big Data Innovation Hubs. Researchers from PSC and Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and Mellon College of Science are part of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub, led by Columbia University.

Cheryl Begandy, director of Education, Outreach and Training at PSC will serve on the hub's Advisory Steering Committee. She will also serve with J. Ray Scott, director of Systems and Operations at PSC, on the hub's Data Sharing Connector Team, which will study platforms and formats for regional data sharing, including software to allow researchers to annotate and publish their own data. PSC intends to play a significant role in enabling efficient storage and analysis of the hub's large public data.

More information on CMU’s role in the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub

NSF Announcement of Big Data Innovation Hubs

Blacklight's Final Bow

August 15, 2015

It’s rare for a HPC center to celebrate the decommissioning of a machine. However, Blacklight was so accomplished, we thought it deserved a special salute.

Here's what others had to say about this remarkable machine.

• "Supercomputer 'Blacklight' to be unplugged today," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Aug. 15, 2015
• "Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center retiring vaunted Blacklight computer," Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Aug. 14, 2015
• "PSC retires Blacklight supercomputer to make way for Bridges," insideHPC.com. Aug. 14, 2015

Study Suggests Vial Size Can Have Large Impact on Vaccine Supply Chain

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Vaccine vial size – the total number of doses a single vaccine vial contains – can have a significant impact on vaccine distribution, costs and use, according to a new study by researchers at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

In a computer model of the vaccine supply chain of the West African nation of Benin, vial-size decisions had far-reaching and reverberating effects throughout the vaccine supply chain. Vial size greatly impacted supply chain logistics, increasing and decreasing constraints and bottlenecks depending on the combination of vial sizes used, with considerable effect on the availability of vaccines. The output of the model, generated by the HERMES software platform developed at Hopkins and PSC, holds great promise for improving the supply of vaccines and other medical tools in Benin, low-income nations and the entire world.

Read the full press release here.

PSC Helps Power Human-AI Poker Match-Up

Friday, April 24, 2015

First, Deep Blue came for Kasparov, besting the world’s top-ranked chess player in 1997. Then Watson beat Jeopardy!’s best and brightest in 2011. Now Claudico, a program developed at Carnegie Mellon University using high performance computing thanks to an XSEDE allocation on Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s Blacklight system, will take on the next great challenge in machine learning: facing off against four of the world’s top 10 players at no-limit, heads-up Texas hold ’em poker. Read the CMU press release https://www.cs.cmu.edu/brains-vs-ai.

The two-week “Brains vs. Artificial Intelligence” tournament begins today at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh, with poker pros Doug Polk, Dong Kim, Bjorn Li and Jason Les facing off against Claudico. Unlike earlier human-machine poker matches involving bid-limited Texas hold ’em, this competition will involve the vastly more complex unlimited version, which offers 10¹⁶¹ (1 followed by 161 zeroes) possible game situations. Not only a program for playing Poker, Claudico is the product of a set of algorithms developed by CMU’s Tuomas Sandholm and students that can automatically derive optimum strategies for virtually any situation in which opponents possess incomplete information, given only the rules of the “game.”

View continuous play:   twitch.tv/Claudico_vs_DougPolk | twitch.tv/Claudico_vs_DongKim | twitch.tv/Claudico_vs_BjornLi | twitch.tv/Claudico_vs_JasonLes

You can also follow the tournament at @psc_live (Twitter) and www.psc.edu.

Rivers Casino is a gambling establishment; no one under age 21 is permitted on casino property.

PSC to Build Early Warning Tool for Fixing Internet Traffic Jams

$300,000 National Science Foundation Grant Will Use Web10G Data to Warn Users, Administrators for Proactive Repair of Slow Data Flow

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

A new, $300,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant will enable software engineers at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) to build the first practical tool for warning individual users and their network administrators when their connection has developed a problem that will slow or halt data flow. The one-year project will build a tool called XSight, intended to become a standard part of the toolbox for maintaining network connections for all operating systems. XSight will build on PSC’s Web10G, a set of software tools for obtaining connection data.

“XSight will represent a proactive approach toward resolving network problems,” says PSC’s Chris Rapier, principal investigator in the project. “It’s different from other approaches to measure network performance because it takes advantage of Web10G’s ability to collect data on individual data transfers, both in the network and in an application’s interaction with the network.”

Dig, Simulations on PSC's Blacklight Suggest Extinction Refuge, Trigger for Modern Human Behavior

Thursday, Feb. 5, 2015

PSC's Blacklight supercomputer features prominently in an International Science Grid this Week story about Curtis Marean of Arizona State University, leader of an international team studying early human settlements in the Cape Floral region of South Africa. Marean is triangulating what may have been humanity's closest brush with extinction using three avenues of research. The team's archeological digs have demonstrated human habitation and life-sustaining protein and carbohydrate food sources at a point in the last glacial maximum when virtually no evidence of humans can be found elsewhere in Africa. DNA evidence points to a roughly contemporaneous genetic bottleneck in which the population crashed to 15,000 or fewer individuals. And new climate simulations of the area using Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's Blacklight supercomputer for the first time provide enough detail to show the area was likely to be an island of moderate climate at a time when the rest of Africa was too arid to support human life. Interestingly, humans began to display modern behavior such as heat-treating stones for tools and artistic representations during this period.

PSC's Bridges featured in TEQ Magazine

With Big Data being all the rage...Pittsburgh Tech Council's TEQ Magazine highlights PSC's Nick Nystrom among local experts providing some much needed context.

VIEW Online Edition: http://content.yudu.com/Library/A3a0sq/TEQMagazineDecember2/resources/index.htm

PSC Receives NSF Award for Bridges Supercomputer

$9.65-Million Supercomputer Will Enable Analysis of Vast Data Sets, Ease Entry for New Research Communities into High-Performance Computing

Read the NSF announcement here.

Monday, Nov. 24, 2014

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) award to create a uniquely capable supercomputer designed to empower new research communities, bring desktop convenience to supercomputing, expand campus access and help researchers needing to tackle vast data to work more intuitively. Called Bridges, the new supercomputer will consist of three tiered, memory-intensive resources to serve a wide variety of scientists, including those new to supercomputing and without specialized programming skills.

Bridges will offer new computational capabilities to researchers working in diverse, data-intensive fields such as genomics, the social sciences and the humanities. A $9.65-million NSF grant will fund the acquisition, to begin in October 2015, with a target production date of January 2016. The system will be delivered by HP® based on an architecture designed by PSC, and will feature advanced technology from Intel® and NVIDIA®.

“The name Bridges stems from three computational needs the system will fill for the research community,” says Nick Nystrom, PSC director of strategic applications and principal investigator in the project. “Foremost, Bridges will bring supercomputing to nontraditional users and research communities. Second, its data-intensive architecture will allow high-performance computing to be applied effectively to big data. Third, it will bridge supercomputing to university campuses to ease access and provide burst capability.”

“Bridges represents a new approach to supercomputing that helps keep PSC and Carnegie Mellon University at the forefront of high-performance computing,” says Subra Suresh, president, Carnegie Mellon University. “It will help researchers tackle and master the new emphasis on data that is now driving many fields.”

“The ease of use planned for Bridges promises to be a game-changer,” says Patrick D. Gallagher, chancellor, University of Pittsburgh. “Among many other applications, we look forward to it helping biomedical scientists here at Pitt and at other universities unravel and understand the vast volume of genomic data currently being generated.”