Featured User Site:

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center http://www.psc.edu/ (PSC) has for 20 years been among the leading centers worldwide in high-performance computing and communication. BigBen, its 22-teraflop Cray XT3, was the first XT3 installed anywhere and is the most powerful tightly-coupled system available via the TeraGrid.

PSC Overview

PSC was established in 1986 as part of the original National Science Foundation initiative that made supercomputers available for U.S. civilian research. It has maintained continuous existence since then, with major support not only from NSF, but also from the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

PSC is a joint effort of the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), together with Westinghouse Electric Company. PSC's scientific directors, Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies, are high-energy physicists and research collaborators on the faculties at CMU and Pitt respectively. PSC's close affiliation with these two major research universities has helped to attract a distinguished pool of talent.

PSC has built a reputation for working with new supercomputing technologies throughout its history of ten major installations, many of which were low serial number systems. In 2001, PSC installed a 6 teraflop HP AlphaServer supercomputer, christened "LeMieux" both in honor of Pittsburgh Penguins hockey star Mario Lemieux and for the literal meaning of le mieux in French: "the best." LeMieux was the first terascale system openly designated for U.S. research, and in 2002, PSC became a member of the fledgling TeraGrid.

In August 2005, NSF awarded $52 million to PSC to support its operations as a TeraGrid lead partner for the next five years. Also in 2005, PSC received the first Cray XT3 shipment, an eventual 22 teraflop system they named "BigBen," another name with both a literal connotation of grandeur and a nod to a Pittsburgh sports hero, Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.

Table: HPC User Resources at PSC

Many significant results have come from research at PSC. Highlights include pioneering air-pollution studies for the Los Angeles air basin that influenced federal legislation, the first three-dimensional model of blood flow in the heart, an accurate forecast of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9's impact with Jupiter, modeling of earthquake soil vibration at unprecedented detail http://www.psc.edu/science/2003/earthquake/, protein modeling that was cited by the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry committee http://www.psc.edu/science/2002/schulten/precious_bodily_fluids.html, and dramatically improved ability to forecast severe thunderstorms http://www.psc.edu/science/2005/storms/, including the "supercells" that spawn tornados.

PSC has additionally built a strong national presence in biomedical research. Its biomedical supercomputing program, established in 1987, was the first such program in the country external to NIH. In October 2006, PSC received $8.5 million from NIH's National Center for Research Resources to renew its program in biomedical supercomputing, the National Resource for Biomedical Supercomputing (NRBSC) http://www.nrbsc.org/. Through NRBSC, directed by PSC senior scientist Joel Stiles, PSC pursues research in the life sciences and fosters exchange nationwide among experts in computational science and biomedicine.

Tabor Research Analysis

PSC is most noteworthy in its adoption of new technologies and the resulting expertise it provides in less common dimensions of leadership computing. BigBen is the TeraGrid's lead resource for large-scale, supercomputing projects that require tightly coupled processors. Nearly half of BigBen's usage has been for projects using more than a thousand processors.

In addition to the research it has enabled in the scientific community, PSC has conducted notable research of its own in several areas high-performance computer-science. PSC has been a leader in tailoring file systems to the high-end computing world, beginning with the introduction of the Andrew File System into the HPC world in the late 1980s, and continuing with its SLASH initiative - Scalable Lightweight Archival Storage Hierarchy - which promotes the use of commodity disks for high-performance data access and storage. PSC's Advanced Networking group's research has led to improvements in the way networks are analyzed and tuned, and to improvements in the ways in which TCP is implemented in high-performance operating systems. PSC has also been one of the pioneers in the development of heterogeneous computing, and it has been a key player in advancing the NSF's cyberinfrastructure initiatives, currently leading the TeraGrid's efforts in user support and in security.

Tabor Research recognizes PSC for its enablement of new levels of scientific research and for its contributions to high-performance computer science. Ongoing NSF funding and TeraGrid participation are helping to ensure the continuation of capability computing at PSC.

Would you like to nominate your user organization to be featured on the Tabor Research web site? Please email your suggestion, including a brief description of the technology in use and why it is noteworthy, to Addison Snell, Addison@TaborResearch.com.