Illinois Wesleyan University
For Illinois Wesleyan University, a liberal arts college in Bloomington, Illinois, membership in the Great Lakes Consortium (GLC) will heighten awareness on campus of parallel computing and supercomputing and afford opportunities for faculty to integrate these techniques into their teaching and research. Participation in the GLC, and access to a peta-scale facility like Blue Waters, affords IWU faculty and students a rare opportunity to be at the forefront of an important, emerging field. Some faculty, like geology professor Greg Pouch, have long been involved with computationally-intensive applications such as geophysics, remote sensing, electronic mapping, and groundwater modeling and plan to use parallel-computing in continuing research projects and development efforts. Through the exchange of ideas within the consortium, other faculty and students will become better positioned to incorporate High Performance Computing into their scholarship. Computational techniques influence and are influenced by the scientific disciplines and our society; as an institution with strong traditions in the liberal arts and undergraduate research, IWU appreciates how quickly 'advanced' techniques become woven into the technological and educational fabric of our society.
Contact: Rebecca Roesner, rroesner@iwu.edu
Indiana University
Indiana University is a current resource partner in the TeraGrid, and a key participant in the TeraGrid's Grid Infrastructure Group. IU's key assetts as a partner in the GLC include the Pervasive Technology Labs and IU School of Informatics (including Professors Dennis Gannon, Geoffrey C. Fox, Andrew Lumsdaine, and Beth Plale). The Research Technologies Division of "University Information Technology Services leads IU activities as a TeraGrid Resource Partner. IU is also a leader in life science research. IU plans to participate in the development of Science Gateways as means to access the new system; aid the development of peta-cale applicaitons in the life sciences; and collaborate, as IU and NCSA already have, in support of critical activities such as prediction of tornadoes with the LEAD (Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery) system.
Contact: Daphne Seifert-Herron, dsiefert@indiana.edu
Iowa State Unviersity
Iowa State University will contribute to the Great Lakes Consortium through HPC projects in computational chemistry, genomics and systems biology, materials science and nanotechnology, and climate modeling. Iowa State faculty are primary developers of two major computational chemistry codes (GAMESS and NWChem), which have a combined user base of over 150,000 in more than 100 countries. These codes will be used to study the structure of liquids, aerosol formation, polymer aggregation, and new material design, with funding from NSF PetaApps program. Iowa State has unique strengths in high performance computational biology, and in studying applications in plant sciences and biorenewables. Planned contributions to the Blue Waters project include comparative genomics of cereal crops, development of genome-scale metabolic models of microbial organisms, and inference of gene networks from high-throuput genome-wide data. In materials science and combinatorial discovery, Iowa State is a pioneer in LEAP atom probe tomography which enables atomic scale imaging of materials. Iowa State researchers are working on creating an international repository of such data and will develop high performance methods for applications in nanotechnology. These and other projects will be carried out under the aegis of Ames Laboratory, Center for Carbon-Capturing Crops, Cyberinnovation Institute, Information Infrastructure Institute, Institute for Combinatorial Discovery, International Materials Science Institute, and Plant Sciences Institute. Local HPC equipment available to interface with the project include Blue Gene/L and large multicore clusters. Iowa State also brings unique infrastructure and expertise in large-scale visualization with one of the few completely immersive six-surface VR rooms (C6) in the world, housed in the Virtual Reality Applications Center (VRAC). At 100M pixel resolution, the image quality and level of immersion far exceeds any other device in the world, making this an ideal cyberenvironment to visualize petascale applications.
Contact: Srinivas Aluru, aluru@iastate.edu
Krell Institute, Inc.
The Krell Institute provides superior technical resources, knowledge and experience in managing national scale technology-based education and information technology programs. Since its inception in 1997, Krell has assisted with initiatives that advance high-performance computing and computational science and engineering for the scientific and technology communities. This includes planning and execution of meetings on specific computational science topics, writing and publication of science and engineering research results, and the development of new educational programs in computational science. In addition, Krell advances the next generation of computational scientists and engineers through its successful management of three outstanding Ph.D. fellowship programs for the Department of Energy.
Contact: John Ziebarth, ziebarth@krellinst.org
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has partnered with the University of Illinois as well as other Universities and National Laboratories in the Great Lakes Consortium. This partnership will untilize the expertise at LANL in Computer Science R&D for High-Performance Computing, and build on LANL's on-going projects targeting high-end computing at the petascale range. Moreover, LANL's researchers participating in the BlueWaters project were active participants with IBM during earlier DARPA HPCS projects, directly contributing to the design of this system architecture.
Specifically, LANL is the performance analysis and modeling arm of the BlueWaters project. Our goal is to create the modeling tools for the system and for the applications of interest, and ultimately to engineer the applications for the highest achievable performance in the petascale regime.
Contact: Adolfy Hoisie, hoisie@lanl.gov
Louisiana State University / Center for Computation & Technology
The LSU Center for Computation & Technology is an interdisciplinary research center that advances computational sciences, technologies and the disciplines they impact. CCT researchers develop and use cyberinfrastructure to enable research in areas as diverse as astrophysics, coastal sciences, digital media and materials science. CCT serves as co-PI on this proposal with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, bringing applications to the Blue Waters facility and developing petascale application toolkits, such as the Cactus framework. The CCT also brings resources to the Great Lakes Consortium, notably the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI), a high-speed, fiber optic network that connect supercomputers at research institutions throughout the state. Through LONI, Louisiana has one of the most advanced networking environments in the world. LONI centers around Queen Bee, a 50-teraflop supercomputer, ranked 23rd most powerful in the world, which is being integrated into the TeraGrid.
Contact: Kristen Sunde, ksunde@cct.lsu.edu
Michigan State University
The High Performance Computing Center at Michigan State University was established in 2005 to meet the increasing computing needs of MSU faculty. Indeed, high performance computing has become a ubiquitous need, from the humanities to the sciences, and MSU's HPCC supports the growing requirements of computing in cutting edge research. In this short time, the HPCC has become an integral part of many research groups, advancing the research in areas such as physics, chemistry, biology and the social sciences.
MSU's faculty and students look forward to collaborating through the GLPCC in a variety of ways. We expect that we will be able to make significant contributions, in particular, to the framing of research problems in a number of fields that petascale computing resources may address.
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is planning to establish cooperative faculty initiatives, to implement state-of-the-art access to computational facilities, and to hire requisite technical experts to provide for appropriate faculty support, specifically to address the challenges represented by the petascale computing facility and to take advantage of the opportunities this facility will make possible. This anticipated program will be supported by new campus computational research facilities, based on advanced technologies and supported by high quality management and operations procedures. Such procedures will be implemented with the flexibility required by faculty research. The facilities will be supported by Northwestern's high performance network (currently being upgraded to add additional capacity, at multiple 10 Gbps) to support data intensive applications from individual research labs to GLC sites and to national and international research and education networks. This upgrade will include a new University-owned optical fiber network between the Evanston campus and the Chicago campus. Northwestern's Chicago campus is the site of the StarLight international and national communications exchange, which is connected to all major research and education networks nationally and world-wide and which has multiple direct optical fiber paths to NCSA.
Contact: Joe Mambretti, j-mambretti@northwestern.edu
The Ohio State University / Ohio Supercomputer Center
The Ohio Supercomputer Center provides supercomputing, networking, research and educational resources to a diverse state and national community, including education, academic research, industry and state government. In its contribution to the Great Lakes Consortium, OSC recruits and supports faculty so they may lead or participate in research projects on petascale computing and petascale science and engineering. Leveraging existing courses that address issues in computer and computational science and engineering, OSC offers training relevant to advancing petascale computing. OSC assists in the development of petascale computing applications, especially in interactive visualization of multi-scale and multi-modal data and high-performance storage and file systems. We also commit to connecting to the other institutions in the Consortium as well as the Petascale Computing Facility at 10 Gbps or higher. This will not only facilitate use of the petascale computing system but will ensure that the educational courses being developed can be readily shared throughout the Consortium.
Contact: Leslie Southern, leslie@osc.edu
Parkland College
Parkland College is a fully accredited, public community college in east central Illinois serving over 18,000 students annually. Parkland delivers both technical and academic instruction in over 100 degree and certificate programs designed for career and job placement or for transfer to programs at four-year institutions. Parkland provides numerous academic support services and resources, including the library, peer tutoring, the Writing Center, the Learning Lab, the Academic Development Center, and online student learning tools and activities.
Parkland College has become a center for educational opportunity and community enrichment in east central Illinois and has earned a national reputation for its excellent academic standards, innovative programs, and quality instruction. Along with its existing award-winning programs in Computer Science and Information Technologies, Parkland will work with other community colleges and universities in the Great Lakes Consortium to build programs that will train technicians to build, work with, and maintain high performance computing systems. Parkland College's Staerkel Planetarium will also provide an excellent site to pilot and disseminate educational products targeting K-12 students and interested community members.
Contact: Tod Treat, ttreat@parkland.edu
Pennsylvania State University / Institute for Computational Science
The Institute for Computational Science at Penn State (ICS@PSU) is organized under the Office of the Senior Vice President for Research to serve as the coordinating unit for multidisciplinary computational science research, education and outreach. The mission of ICS@PSU is to advance discovery through computing by growing the foundational core of computational science and advancing its frontiers in the Environmental, Life, Materials and Social sciences. As a GLPC partner, ICS@PSU will provide a unique virtual laboratory to investigate complex problems that are otherwise impossible or impractical to address, ranging from the genomic/molecular basis of infectious disease dynamics to the impacts of a digital society.
Contact: Kelly Freeman, kellyfreeman@psu.edu
Shiloh Community Unit School District #1 (Illinois)
Shiloh CUSD#1 is pleased to be a charter member of the Great Lakes Consortium. Shiloh is a K-12 public school district located in Hume IL, which is about 45 miles south of the UIUC campus in Champaign-Urbana. The district is a small rural school district with a high poverty rate, but the staff is extremely progressive and aggressive users of technology. Many staff members either dual teach in Universities or are involved in research projects with Illinois Universities. The Board and community have made a conscious decision to offer students access to current technology with a 5 year project to upgrade every classroom to a technology rich teaching center. As a participant in the Blue Waters project it is anticipated staff will utilize modeling and visualization tools in the classroom. The other planned activity is to re-introduce programming activities in the math and science curriculum. The Shiloh District is eager to get started.
Contact: Terence Sullivan, sullivant@shiloh.k12.il.us
Shodor Education Foundation, Inc.
Shodor, a national resource for computational science education, is located in Durham, NC and serves students and educators nationwide. Our online education tools such as Interactivate and the Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD), a Pathway Portal of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), help transform learning through computational thinking. In addition to developing and deploying interactive models, simulations, and educational tools, Shodor serves students and educators directly through workshops and other hands-on experiences. Shodor offers innovative workshops helping faculty and teachers incorporate computational science into their own curricula or programs. This work is done primarily through its National Computational Science Institute (NCSI) in partnership with TeraGrid, NCSA, and other NSF-funded initiatives. For students from middle school through undergraduate levels of education, Shodor offers workshops, apprenticeships, internships and off-site programs that explore new approaches to math and science education through computational science. Time and time again, Shodor has been recognized as a national leader and a premier resource in the effective use of computers to improve both math and science education.
Contact: Robert M. Panoff, rpanoff@shodor.org
Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA)
The Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) is a well established 501 (c) 3 membership association comprised of 64 research universities located in 16 southern US states plus the District of Columbia. SURA's broad mission is to foster excellence in scientific research, to strengthen the scientific and technical capabilities of the nation and of the Southeast, and to provide outstanding training opportunities for the next generation of scientists and engineers. SURA builds collaborations to strengthen the support of science in the national interest—in nuclear physics, information technology, and coastal research. A SURA information technology program, SURAgrid, is a coordinated program of planning, development, implementation and education targeted at promoting the use of cyberinfrastructure in support of research and education in the SURA region.
Contact: Gary Crane, gcrane@sura.org
University of Illinois at Chicago
The University of Illinois at Chicago's interdisciplinary Electronic Visualization Laboratory, which specializes in developing networked large-scale visualization, virtual reality and collaboration technologies, will help create virtual "on/off ramps" that will provide Blue Waters' users fast and comprehendible access to petabyte-sized data flows. Among likely early UIC users are the National Center for Data Mining, which relies on supercomputing power to analyze cyberdefense data and detect new patterns representing emerging threats, and the College of Engineering's Computational Multiphase Transport Laboratory, which plans to run simulations of liquid fuel combustors for jet and rocket engines.
Contact: Paul Francuch, francuch@uic.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Along with the leadership of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, many of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's academic units play an active role in the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation. Members of the electrical and computer engineering department and the Coordinated Science Laboratory will focus on issues surrounding accelerator technologies and graphics processing units as well as performance and reliability analysis of high-end computing systems. Members of the computer science department and the Illinois Informatics Institute, meanwhile, will aid in the development of system software and scientific and engineering applications for petascale computing and beyond. Finally, many of the science and engineering departments will develop applications for and make use of Blue Waters to enable the solution of outstanding problems in their fields.
Contact: Anita Broeren, abroeren@uiuc.edu
The University of Iowa
The University of Iowa is a partner in the TeraGrid. The UI College of Engineering Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology is using the supercomputer network to advance a project aimed at identifying the genetic causes of various diseases, such as glaucoma, in order to help improve diagnosis and treatment, according to center director Thomas Casavant. Jun Ni, associate professor and director of scientific computing at UI Information Technology Services, together with Thom Dunning of NCSA will soon launch the cPCN (Petascale Computing for Nanotechnology Consortium) in order to promote high performance computing in nanotechnology. Jerald Schnoor, professor, is one of three co-directors of a project office to plan a $350 million NSF national environmental observatory called the Collaborative Large-scale Engineering Analysis Network for Environmental Research (CLEANER). The UI also plans to make use of petascale computing in medical imaging and radiology informatics.
Contact: Gary Galluzzo, gary-galluzzo@uiowa.edu
University of Minnesota / Minnesota Supercomputing Institute
Founded in 1984, the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) is an interdisciplinary research program spanning all colleges of the University of Minnesota. MSI provides supercomputing resources and user support to faculty and students and is a linchpin program in the University's broad-based digital technology effort. The mission of the MSI is supercomputing research. This includes all aspects of high-performance computing and scientific modeling and simulation, as well as graphics, visualization, high-performance network communications, informatics, and data mining.
MSI's resources are available to researchers at the University of Minnesota and other post-secondary educational institutions in the State of Minnesota and their collaborators. In addition, MSI organizes and hosts symposia, workshops, and seminars, and coordinates other educational and collaborative activities to promote supercomputing research, increase university -- industry collaboration, and promote technology transfer. Hardware resources include both core resources and laboratories. In addition to hardware and software, MSI provides an extensive program of user support and training.
Currently, MSI's participation in the GLC is anticipated to include the following projects: "Algorithmic Advances in the Stochastic Simulation of Biochemistry," "Bioinformatics -- Biochemical Pathways," "High-Performance Data Mining for Health and Life Sciences Data," and "Scalable Benchmarks, Software and Data for Data Mining, Analytics and Scientific Discoveries."
Contact: info@msi.umn.edu
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill / Renaissance Computing Institute
The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) is a major collaborative venture of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Duke University and North Carolina State University. Supported by the state of North Carolina, RENCI brings together academia, government, industry and world-class computing and technology resources to find innovative solutions to complex multidisciplinary problems related to healthcare, the environment and other critical issues. In all its efforts, RENCI uses innovative technologies and multidisciplinary collaboration to solve problems so that North Carolina and the U.S. thrive in the 21st century knowledge economy. As a member of the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation, RENCI will develop methods and tools for monitoring and analyzing performance on Blue Waters, the leadership class supercomputer to be located at NCSA. RENCI's work will focus on monitoring performance and understanding and troubleshooting potential problems on a computing system of unprecedented power. RENCI researchers also will work closely with scientific teams to ensure that their codes run smoothly on Blue Waters.
Contact: Karen Green, kgreen@renci.org
Wayne City High School (Illinois)
Wayne City High School is a small rural southern Illinois public high school with an enrollment of 185 students. Wayne City High has a long history of offering computer science and programming courses to its students, beginning with early Apple ][ integer basic programming in the late 70's and progressing to current Python programming in OpenGL with Linux. Wayne City High School has collaborated with the Integrated Systems Laboratory at the Beckman Institute in creating a CUBE virtual reality demonstration of the Lorenz strange attractor. Dr. Stan Blank, the computer science instructor at Wayne City High school, hopes to be able to implement the petascale computing capability of the new system to explore the possibilities of immersive virtual education for high school students as well as allowing promising students access to petascale programming tools. The ultimate goal would be to take what is learned in a small rural school environment during this process and facilitate petascale access for other school systems.
Contact: Stan Blank, sblank@accessus.net