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• 2009

Supercomputing in Pennsylvania

With Commonwealth of Pennsylvania support, PSC provides education, consulting, advanced network access and computational resources to scientists and engineers, teachers and students across the state

Discover 09: PSC Open House

With a turnout of 131 people, including students and teachers from local universities and representatives from governmental organizations, PSC’s first annual “Discover” Open House introduced high-performance computing to a regional audience. PSC animated visual displays highlighted modeling in many fields, such as storm forecasting, earthquake soil vibration and realistic cellular modeling. “With many contacts made and information shared,” said Begandy, “we showed how the revolution of computational science represents an opportunity in many areas, including small business.”

Introducing Warhol: New PSC System Supports Pennsylvania Research
Through an arrangement with Hewlett-Packard (HP), PSC in January made available a 64-core, HP Blade System featuring eight nodes — each housing two Intel Xeon quad-core processors and 16 gigabytes of memory — interconnected by an InfiniBand link. Named Warhol, this new PSC system is provided as a resource to researchers in Pennsylvania.

“At PSC we have collaborated with Hewlett-Packard for many years,” said J. Ray Scott, PSC director of systems and operations, “in development of innovative software and hardware to support research. In making this new system available to PSC, they further our mutually productive partnership.”

K-12 Science Education

With dynamic K-12 educational and outreach programs (see pp. 9-11), PSC helps to prepare technology-ready workers and a science-literate populace. PSC workshops this year trained 120 science teachers in 32 school districts in Western Pennsylvania.

School districts in Pennsylvania are organized into intermediate units (IUs), which provide academic, technical and administrative services for the districts. In November 2008, PSC hosted a group of IU directors from across the state. PSC staff described its K-12 outreach programs, including connectivity through 3ROX (see p. 12) and its new CyberSafety program. In February, PSC repeated this program for the Mercer County IU. Attendees included over 50 administrators, curriculum coordinators and technology directors from 15 districts.

In October 2008, in collaboration with the Leonard Gelfand Center for Service Learning and Outreach at Carnegie Mellon, PSC sponsored a Symposium on Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM) Strategies and Practices. To an audience of 32 school superintendents, science curriculum coordinators and STEM teachers from the region, PSC staff presented an overview of STEM-related programs at PSC and Carnegie Mellon and on STEM initiatives regionally and nationally.

Community Outreach

PSC staff take part in numerous outreach programs, locally and nationally. PSC exhibited at the SciTech Initiative in March at the Carnegie Science Center. With a theme of “What is supercomputing and how is it used?,” PSC’s booth — visited by more than 400 attendees — included hands-on materials to stimulate student thinking. As part of this event, PSC was a bronze sponsor of the Pittsburgh Regional Science and Technology Fair in April, presenting awards to students whose projects best exemplified computational science. One of these students, with PSC encouragement, took his project to the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair and won third place in Mathematical Sciences.

Private-Sector & University Research

Research by university scientists in Pennsylvania supported by PSC is exemplified by several projects in this booklet:

• Wiring Diagram of the Brain: Greg Hood & Art Wetzel, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in collaboration with Clay Reid, Harvard University (p. 20).
• Identity Theft Vulnerability: Alessandro Acquisti & Ralph Gross, Carnegie Mellon University (p. 24).
• Reactivity of Molecular Chains: Ken Jordan & colleagues, University of Pittsburgh (p. 36).
• New Findings in Quantum Chromodynamics: Colin Morningstar & colleagues, Carnegie Mellon University (p. 40).
• PSC this year entered a partner agreement with the Pennsylvania NanoMaterials Commercialization Center: www.pananocenter.org/

Modeling the Spread of H1N1

On Pittsburgh’s WTAE-TV this October, PSC scientist Shawn Brown demonstrated PSC modeling of the spread of the H1N1 virus in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. Brown's work is part of the National Institutes of Health’s Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS) project, which supports research to simulate disease spread, evaluate intervention strategies and help inform health policymakers. He collaborates with the Pittsburgh MIDAS Center of Excellence, led by Donald Burke, M.D., of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.