Supercomputing in Pennsylvania
PSC provides education, consulting, advanced network access and computational resources to scientists and engineers, teachers and students across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
3ROX:Network for Education
The Three Rivers Optical Exchange (3ROX) provides research and education network service to seven Intermediate Units in western Pennsylvania that serve 116 school districts, more than 600 schools, 21,000 teachers and 300,000 students. 3ROX links these schools, teachers and students to a global community of people and ideas.
Research & Training in Pennsylvania
Shared Memory Poker
Using PSC’s Blacklight system, Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Tuomas Sandholm and his Ph.D. student Sam Ganzfried did well at Toronto in July — the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) annual Computer Poker Competition. In recent years, poker has emerged as an AI challenge similar to that served for many years by chess, but more demanding. “In poker,” says Sandholm, “a player doesn’t know which cards the other player holds or what cards will be dealt in the future. Such games of incomplete information are much harder to solve than completeinformation games.”
Sandholm’s field, game theory, in which his work is internationally recognized, describes conflict in which the payoff is affected by actions and counteractions of intelligent opponents. Like many games, poker can be formulated mathematically, but the formulations are unimaginably huge. Two-player nolimit Texas Hold’em poker has a “game tree” of about 1071 nodes, hence the usefulness of large amounts of memory. At Toronto, running with Blacklight, the Sandholm group’s poker-playing agent finished second in the instant runoff scoring for two-player no-limit Texas Hold’em.
PSC’s new disk-based data storage, the Data Supercell, implemented with support from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program. Pennsylvania organizations using the Data Supercell include the National Energy Technology Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University, the Software Engineering Institute, the University of Pittsburgh Developmental Biology Program, and Drexel University’s Design Arts Group.
Continuing a long-standing relationship with Lehigh University, PSC in March did a half-day workshop on parallel programming of multi-core computing systems. PSC scientist John Urbanic presented material on programmerfriendly standards (OpenMP and Open ACC) to 35 students as part of Lehigh’s annual HPC Symposium.
In June, PSC scientific co-director Ralph Roskies and PSC director of networking Wendy Huntoon addressed information officers and other leaders of the 14 universities of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. Their presentation highlighted how computational science and cyberinsfrastructure are changing research and outlined possible collaboration between PSC and PASSHE universities.
As part of a program sponsored by PAIUnet, Pennsylvania’s statewide, high-speed educational network, PSC in March helped to develop and coordinate a data-modeling session for high-school students taking part in the state-wide Marcellus Shale Project. Also, through its BEST and CAST programs (see pp. 8-9), PSC provides continuing training and curriculum materials for western Pennsylvania high-school math and science teachers.
Pennsylvania Research
Innovation
Several projects in this booklet highlight
research in Pennsylvania enabled through
PSC:
• Bright Lights, Big Cosmos: Astrophysicists
at Carnegie Mellon University are
simulating the period in the evolution of
the Universe when stars, galaxies and black
holes first appeared (p. 40).
• Modeling Aortic Aneurysms: Drawing
on data from Allegheny General Hospital,
biomedical engineers are modeling aortic
aneurysms so that it will be possible to
better guide decisions on when surgery is
required (p. 44).
• When Small Worlds Collide: A Lehigh
University physicist is calculating spin
properties of molecules that could help
lead to quantum computing, much faster
than today’s supercomputers (p. 45).
• Fighting Dengue Resurgence:
Researchers at PSC and the University of
Pittsburgh are developing tools to help
public-health decision makers intervene
effectively to stop the world-wide spread
of dengue fever (p. 47).
Supercomputing Provided to Pennsylvania Organizations
From July 2011 through June 2012, PSC provided more than 7.8 million processor hours to 917 individual Pennsylvania researchers from 40 institutions. The following Pennsylvania corporations, universities, colleges and K-12 institutions used PSC resources during this period:
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Albright College Allegheny General Hospital Allegheny-Singer Research Institute Bryn Mawr College Carnegie Mellon University Cedar Crest College Cheyney University of Pennsylvania Community College of Allegheny County Dickinson College Drexel University Duquesne University Dynamix Technologies Frazier School District Grove City College |
Haverford College Indiana University of PA, all campuses Kutztown University of Pennsylvania Lehigh University Life Technologies Lock Haven University Marconi Services Oakland Catholic High School Our Lady of Sacred Heart High School PA CYBER Charter School Pennsylvania State University, all campuses Pittsburgh Public Schools Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania |
Slippery Rock University Swarthmore College Temple University Thomas Jefferson University University of Pennsylvania University of Pittsburgh, all campuses University of the Sciences in Philadelphia Upper St. Clair High School Ursinus College Vitaerx Wilkes University Winchester-Thurston School |
Download a pdf of this
article as it appears in Projects in Scientific Computing, 2012