Media Contact:
Dr. Henry Schaffer, 919/515-5479

Oct. 31, 2003

HPC workshops offered to graduate students and researchers

NC State's Information Technology Division/High Performance Computing (HPC) project is offering a short course November 3-7 for graduate students and researchers working in computational sciences. The course marks a significant new phase in the new HPC program, which now has an IBM p690 and a 128-processor (64 node) IBM Blade Center Linux cluster in production mode. These resources are being heavily used to support some of the university's most preeminent scientific research in fields as diverse as astrophysics and nanomaterials.

The workshops will focus on on MPI (Message Passing Interface) standards designed for high performance on both massively parallel machines and workstation clusters such as those available on campus. Dr. Eric Sills, HPC Research Computing Associate and Dr. Gary Howell, nationally recognized expert in high performance and parallel computation, will teach the course.

Prof. Howell currently works at the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center - Major Shared Resource Center in Vicksburg, MS. He will join the NC State ITD/HPC staff in January, 2004 as an HPC specialist.

Jointly funded by the Office of the Provost and Research and Graduate Studies, the ITD/HPC project was launched in July 2003, as part of the regional response to the closing of the North Carolina Supercomputing Center announced in May. Along with the campus Bioinformatics Grid, the ITD/HPC resources contribute to the recently announced North Carolina Grid Computing Initiative.

For more information about ITD/HPC
http://hpc.ncsu.edu

For more information about the North Carolina Grid Computing initiative:
http://www.mcnc.org/gridforum/

For a recent report on the possible economic impact of Grid Computing in North Carolina:
http://www.e-nc.org/pdf/grid_report_oct-28-03.pdf

MPI Course Schedule:

• Monday, November 3, 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon
  "Overview of MPI"
  Location: 402A Withers Hall
• Tuesday - Thursday, November 4 - 6, 1:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
  "Introduction to MPI, parts 1-3"
  Location: 402A Withers
• Friday, November 7, 1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
  "Overview of MPI"
  ITD Conference Room - 213 Hillsborough Building

Several spaces are still available in the MPI course. To register, contact judy_beaver@ncsu.edu