CENTER FOR HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING AT UNM UNDERGOES REORGANIZATION PLAN

September 5, 2003

CENTER FOR HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING AT UNM UNDERGOES REORGANIZATION PLAN

Sometimes change is good, and in the case of the Center for High Performance Computing (HPC), it’s a welcomed opportunity. The HPC recently underwent a few 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, it’s 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 for HPC@UNM 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 A. 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 research thrusts 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 be offering five different 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 offered through the Center for HPC@UNM, visit the website at www.hpc.unm.edu or call Candace Shirley at 277-9543.

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