High
Performance Computing reorganizes
By Steve
Carr
The Center
for High Performance Computing (HPC) recently underwent changes
including new management, mission and focus, which gives Marc
Ingber, who was hired as the director earlier this year, reason
to be excited.
In
a sense, its good for the center because we can concentrate
more effort on academic aspects of high performance computing,
said Ingber, who is also a professor in the Mechanical Engineering
Department at the UNM School of Engineering (SOE). The
center is the focal point for all aspects of high performance
computing at UNM. We have a new, broad-based leadership team
consisting of faculty from the Health Sciences Center (HSC),
College of Arts & Sciences (A&S) and the School of Engineering.
This group has provided the new intellectual directions for
the center.
The leadership
team consists of the new associate director, Barney Maccabe
from the Computer Science Department, SOE, and the faculty steering
committee. The steering committee includes David Bader and Wennie
Shu from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department,
SOE; Vageli Coutsias from the Mathematics and Statistics Department,
A&S; Debi Evans from the Chemistry Department, A&S;
Richard Larson from the Pathology Department, HSC; and Tudor
Oprea, from the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department,
HSC.
The
directions and goals of the center are coming from the faculty
steering committee, which is important to me, Ingber said.
I believe in a bottom up approach. We are interested in
getting as much participation from the university community
as possible.
We have a strong center with national visibility built over
the last 10 years. People in the community and abroad know about
UNM and the HPC, which has world class faculty.
In the
reorganization of the HPC, the center has established both systems
and application research thrusts. The center ultimately would
like to merge the systems and application research with production
computing using a vertical integration strategy.
As explained
by the new associate director, Barney Maccabe, vertical integration
combines research in computer systems, advanced algorithms and
application science to enable new knowledge.
The center
also supports a variety of educational and outreach activities
to make high performance computing more accessible, not only
to the UNM community, but also to regional businesses and industry.
Starting in mid-September, the center will offer workshops designed
to introduce faculty, students and staff to high performance
computing and facilities provided by the center. The workshops
include: Introduction to HPC@UNM; Message Passing Interface
I & II; Fortran 90/95 and Parallel Numerical Libraries.
Researchers
need increased processing speed, more memory and the ability
to run larger data sets and simulations in order to investigate
increasingly complex problems, said Ingber. At the
HPC, researchers will be able to use facilities and services
not available anywhere else at UNM.
For more
information on the workshops, visit www.hpc.unm.edu
or call Candace Shirley at 277-9543.