WITH COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA SUPPORT, PSC PROVIDES EDUCATION, CONSULTING, ADVANCED NETWORK ACCESS AND COMPUTATIONAL RESOURCES TO SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS IN PENNSYLVANIA.

Download the PDF version of this article as it appeared in Projects in Scientific Computing, 2002.

Workforce Development

PSC workshops provide training for industry researchers as well as for university faculty and students. They include extensive hands-on sessions, either in PSC's Computer Training Center or at corporate and academic sites around the state. During the past year, along with many workshops in Pittsburgh, PSC presented a workshop in Parallel Programming Techniques at Penn State.

Beverly Clayton, PSC executive director, coordinates PSC's program for Pennsylvania researchers. On Oct. 29, 2001, she em-ceed the ribbon-cutting celebration for PSC's terascale computing system, named LeMieux, for the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey great, whose name in French means the best. "The Terascale is the latest in a line of PSC systems," said Clayton, "that honor the Pittsburgh tradition of hard work by connecting its legacy of championship sports with PSC's computational achievements."

PSC trains Pennsylvania students through undergraduate internships. Since 1986, over 400 students have been interns at PSC, and many have gone on to find jobs in Pennsylvania. During the past year, PSC employed 37 undergraduate students from Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Penn State and St. Vincent College.

Economic Development

PSC's high-performance computing and networking resources help to boost the competitiveness of Pennsylvania business and industry. During the past year, PSC consultants have worked with a major Pittsburgh corporation to identify ways in which they can exploit the resources of PSC's CRAY T3E and Terascale Computing System to support their work in computational chemistry and quantum mechanics.

At the Bechtel Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in Pittsburgh, PSC prepared and presented the second of two customized technology briefing days. PSC consultants provided Bechtel Bettis staff with information on how to develop, manage and use a parallel distributed-computing environment. The training included grid computing, hierarchical storage and scientific visualization.

Governor Schweiker and PSC industrial coordinator Cheryl Begandy at BIO 2002.

PSC outreach includes presence at numerous conferences and science fairs. This June, Governor Mark Schweiker visited the PSC booth at BIO 2002 in Toronto. At this international life sciences conference, PSC joined over 200 representatives of Pennsylvania government and industrial academic organizations to launch the Pennsylvania Life Sciences Greenhouse Initiative.

Other outreach includes briefings and tours, which this year included several public-school groups as well the members of the Pennsylvania Senate Communications and High Technology Committee.

Research in Pennsylvania

By supporting Pennsylvania university researchers, PSC resources help to attract research funds to the state. During the past year, more than 700 Pennsylvania researchers from 14 institutions used more than a million CRAY T3E processor hours through PSC's Pennsylvania program. In addition, Pennsylvania campus researchers used nearly two million processor hours on the Terascale Computing System through the National Science Foundation allocation process. The projects represented here, along with other Pennsylvania projects featured in Projects in Scientific Computing (What Happens at the Active Site, New Weapons for the Germ Wars, Blood Flow and Artificial Organs, Finding the Doubly Charmed Baryon, Recipes for Amorphous Metal), exemplify how supercomputing plays a role in scientific and engineering research in Pennsylvania.

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The Visible Human

Fundamental Studies in Chemistry

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