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.”

UPR, PSC Minority STEM Outreach Work Wins Best Workforce Diversity Paper Award at XSEDE16

July 25, 2016

A peer-reviewed report by researchers from the University of Puerto Rico and PSC surveying students at PSC's MARC Summer Internship has won the Best Workforce Development and Diversity Paper at the XSEDE16 supercomputing conference. The investigators offer suggestions on how minority-serving instutions and high-performance computing centers can better help improve the preparation of students for careers as bioinformatics scientists.

Read more: New Approach Needed to Bring Minority Students into Bioinformatics

Read the paper: Assisting Bioinformatics Programs at Minority Institutions: Needs Assessment and Lessons Learned—A Look at an Internship Program

Making Big Data DANCE(S)

XSEDE Project Successfully Tests Scheduled Networking of Big Data

July 22, 2016

A project to make movement of the largest datasets more efficient has tested for the first time networking hardware components necessary for scheduling network bandwidth using Software Defined Networking (SDN). Researchers from the National Science Foundation’s XSEDE collaboration of supercomputing sites reported at the XSEDE16 conference in Miami how they tested transfer of Big Data between two XSEDE sites, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) and the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) at the University of Tennessee.

New Approach Needed to Bring Minority Students into Bioinformatics

Study of PSC Internship Shows a Need To Go Beyond Traditional Outreach

July 19, 2016

Bringing more minority students into the bioinformatics training pipeline may require a major rethink of STEM outreach to minority-serving institutions (MSIs) and more funding, a team from the University of Puerto Rico and PSC reported today at the XSEDE16 supercomputing conference in Miami.

Just in Time

Virtual File System Will Save Vast Computer Storage Space by Processing Images on the Fly

July 19, 2016

Researchers analyzing complex multidimensional images may be able to save hundreds of terabytes of disk space, a team from PSC reported at the XSEDE16 supercomputing conference in Miami today. Their “virtual file system” software now in development will carry out image processing on the fly, for any viewing software, saving vast data storage by making it unnecessary to maintain multiple copies of processed datasets.

PSC Staff to Present on Big Data Resources, Education and Technology at XSEDE16

July 12, 2016

Experts from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) and their collaborators will present a number of topics at XSEDE16, the fifth annual conference of the NSF-funded Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). XSEDE16 will take place at the Intercontinental Miami Hotel on July 17 through 21.

Drones Could Be Cheaper Alternative in Delivering Vaccines

Unmanned aerial vehicles could also improve vaccination rates in low- and middle-income countries

June 21, 2016

Unmanned drone delivery of vaccines may save money and improve vaccination rates in low- and middle-income countries, according to a new computer simulation by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC).

Delivery of vaccines by drones may be quicker and cheaper than by land-based methods limited by road conditions and the need for costly fuel and maintenance, according to the HERMES advanced computer model. The researchers reported their findings today in the journal Vaccine.

“When we're considering changes such as introducing drone delivery to a system as dynamic as a vaccine supply chain we might see unexpected consequences, not all of which are positive,” says Leila Haidari, public health applications manager at PSC and coauthor in the paper. “Computational modeling gives us the ability to assess the potential impacts of the change and inform our decision making.”

Read more about the study.

Read more about the HERMES supply chain model.