Ohio Advances State's Computational Research Success with Third Round of Cluster Ohio Awards

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Feb 4, 2004) — 

For more information, contact:
Leslie Southern
High Performance Computing Director
(614) 292-9367
leslie@osc.edu

Columbus, OH - February 4, 2004 - The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) has awarded five AMD Athlon clusters to Ohio research teams as part of its Cluster Ohio program. The high performance computing (HPC) clusters provided by OSC enable advanced research capabilities and promote Ohio's national competitiveness in science and technology discovery.

Through a competitive peer review process, OSC selected five faculty research proposals for Cluster Ohio's third round (Rev3) of hardware grants. OSC will distribute Athlon AMD computer system clusters -- including hardware, software, and maintenance -- to the awardees.

Awardees and their proposal titles include:

  • Dr. Jacques Amar, Dr. Jon Eric Bjorkman, and Dr. Constantine E. Theodosiou University of Toledo, Department of Physics & Astronomy
    "Acquisition of an AMD Cluster for Advanced Computational Modeling in Physics and Astronomy"
  • Dr. Scott Hooper
    Ohio University, Department of Biological Sciences
    "A Parallel Processing Facility for Complex Biological Systems"
  • Dr. Christopher Kochanek, Dr. David H Weinberg, Dr. Anil K Pradhan, and Dr. Richard W Pogge
    The Ohio State University, Department of Astronomy
    "A Cluster for Astrophysical Computing"
  • Dr. Walter R. Lambrecht, Dr. John Ruhl, Dr. Rolfe G. Petschek, Dr. Philip L. Taylor, Dr. Lawrence Krauss, Dr. Robert Brown, and Dr. Glenn Starkman
    Case Western Reserve University, Physics Department
    "Computational Physics from Materials to Astrophysics"
  • Dr. Wolfgang Windl, Dr. Ju Li, and Dr. Yunzhi Wang
    The Ohio State University, Department of Materials Science and Engineering
    "Highly Parallel Multiscale Modeling Suite for the Simulation of Real Materials"

Trey White, Research Computer Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Center for Computational Sciences, said, "These new proposals will extend the success of Cluster Ohio to new locations and exciting new application areas. I think Cluster Ohio is giving researchers in the State of Ohio a real advantage in training, software development, and novel applications for high performance computing."

"We have met several goals for the Cluster Ohio program," said Leslie Southern, OSC HPC Director. "For several years now, we have built a strong foundation for effective use of cluster grids for interdisciplinary and grid computing research."

"On a small scale, our goal is to provide hardware for some of the state's academic researchers," added Doug Johnson, OSC Cluster Ohio Technical Lead. "On a larger scale, we help these researchers leverage their applications for greater outside funding and more extensive local computing resources while they develop parallel algorithms or software that can benefit other scientists in Ohio."

The peer review panel is comprised of computer scientists, engineers, and researchers from National Science Foundation centers, Department of Energy centers, and Ohio universities.

"The Cluster Ohio program is a model for establishing coherent grid infrastructure. Participating in the reviews not only gives me an opportunity to serve the HPC community, it also allows me to become aware of the excellent work going on in Ohio," said John Towns, Division Director for Scientific Computing at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

For Rev3, OSC will provide five AMD Athlon clusters, each with 24 compute nodes, one login node, and one storage node. The approximate value of the hardware is $100,000.

The Cluster Ohio Project, an initiative of OSC, the Ohio Board of Regents, and the OSC Statewide Users Group, benefits Ohio faculty who manage research projects ranging from cell biology and chemistry to astrophysics and fluid mechanics. This OSC initiative extends the useful life of cluster equipment by redistributing the computational resources to Ohio faculty, connecting them to enhanced teaching and research resources.

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