Vision:

     The High Performance Computing center will promote the learning, applications and advancement of high performance computing for faculty, students, and external agencies. High performance computing utilizes specially networked computers, having super-computer powers, to compute, simulate, visualize and model problems in many disciplines (business and finance, biology and bioinformatics, engineering, physical sciences and geography).

     For faculty the center's focus will be applications to advance their research. The focus for students will be real-world applications providing a significant educational opportunity to develop highly prized computer-computational skills. The center will develop alliances with groups having mathematical modeling and simulation needs and form affiliations with similar high performance computing centers.

     More specifically, it will be possible for students in their junior or senior years to collaborate with a faculty member, to develop computational skills and experience in high performance computing for a specific application. Then the students will have an opportunity to plan and execute a senior or graduate level project. As a result, our students will be well positioned either for a position in a high demand area of computing or for graduate education in their major or in a hybrid area of computational analysis.

Mission:

The High Performance Computing center will:

• Provide training in high performance computing
• Develop curriculum, e.g. modeling dynamical systems
• Design and run applications
• Seek grant funding
• Continue to accumulate and up-grade hardware and software
• Establish affiliations
• Encourage research and applications in high performance computing.

Current status:

     The HIPERC group began in the spring of 2001 with grants from Institutional Resources and TIP. We have acquired from NASA used equipment worth approximately $450,000. Two clusters, in physics and mathematics, are in operation.

     The group has established an affiliation with Computational Science Research Center at San Diego State University. It will seek an affiliation with the Hauptman-Woodward Research Center in Buffalo.

     Two faculty are testing their research, requiring high demand numerical computations.

     There is a continuing cadre of science students working on the clusters.

     Another visit to NASA is planned: to acquire more equipment and, for the third time, to expose students to NASA-Goddard activities. The group also met with three representatives of Sun Micro to learn about their hardware-software and their grant support.

The group has a web site: http://www.hiperc.org

Needs:

To advance its mission the HIPERC group has immediate and long-range needs:

• Dedicated space to house the clusters, one in Bishop Hall and one in the Science Building--this need is imperative if the clusters are to be operational and accessible to students and faculty
• Graduate assistantships to provide enrichment for graduate students, training support for students, and operational assistance to faculty
• Grant writing support
• Continued grant support from BSC, e.g. travel funds to travel to NASA
• Release time for a faculty from the group to develop curriculum and further the mission so that the group becomes institutionalized as a discrete center.

Release 1.0

7/19/01