FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 				CONTACT:
May 9, 1996						John Westropp
							westropp@psc.edu
							Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
							412-268-4960

"This is both an honor for the center and the researchers that use the resources here," said Ralph Roskies, PSC's scientific co-director. "It also underscores the significance of the National Science Foundation supercomputing program." NSF funding has helped support four U.S. supercomputing centers since 1986.

"These projects," added co-director Michael Levine, "illustrate a few of the many ways in which supercomputing's ability to solve otherwise intractable problems has a positive impact on society."

The following four PSC collaborations are finalists in the Science category of the 1996 Computerworld Smithsonian Awards:

• At Carnegie Mellon University, Ted Russell and colleague Greg McRae, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used PSC's Cray C90 to demonstrate that smog reduction strategies can be improved through selective control of nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons, produced from automobile emissions and many other manmade sources.

• At the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Gary Glatzmaier used PSC's CRAY C90 to produce the first three-dimensional computer simulation of how the Earth's magnetic field is generated and how it occasionally reverses its direction. The work required 5,000 hours of computing time to simulate 80,000 years of geodynamic history, providing insights into the nature of the Earth's magnetic field.

• Scientists at California Institute of Technology's Scalable Concurrent Programming Laboratory, used PSC's CRAY T3D to simulate the aerodynamics of the Delta II satellite launch vehicle. The simulations lower the cost of space operations by providing a means of identifying flaws that cannot be traced through existing test procedures.

• The Center for Light Microscope Imaging and Biotechnology, a National Science Foundation science and technology center based at Carnegie Mellon University, was recognized for developing automated light microscope technology to observe the dynamics of living cells. In collaboration with PSC, the center is using supercomputing to greatly accelerate the acquisition, analysis and display of three-dimensional image data.

CWSA awards have recognized Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center each year since 1992, when Westinghouse Electric Corp. won the Science award for their work establishing university-based supercomputing centers, including PSC. In 1993, PSC won the Science award for biomedical research on the interactions between DNA and proteins. In 1994, research at PSC that led to a three-dimensional computational model of blood flow in the heart won the CWSA award for Breakthrough Computational Science. In 1995, PSC was a finalist in Science for research simulating the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh together with Westinghouse Electric Corporation, was established in 1986 by a grant from the National Science Foundation with support from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Additional major support comes from the National Institutes of Health. PSC's mission is to develop and make available state-of-the-art high-performance computing for scientific researchers nationwide.

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