Departments
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Week of 10 October 1997 |
Vol. I, No. 4 |
Feature
Article
Boston University a partner in national computing alliance
Boston University has joined research partners across the United States to build the infrastructure that will link many of the world's most advanced computers into a powerful computing network. The National Computational Science Alliance will enable researchers to solve complex problems in fields such as cosmology, molecular biology, nanomaterials, and environmental hydrology.
BU will participate through mariner, its regional center of high performance computing resources; by working with other partners to develop the technologies needed to build an advanced distributed computing environment; and by playing a central role in coordinating education and outreach activities for the Alliance.
To help achieve these objectives, the University has added 128 processors to its Silicon Graphics (SGI) Origin2000 system, giving it a total of 192 processors and making it one of the most powerful systems available on any U.S. university campus.
"We are at the end of our first decade of providing increasingly advanced and powerful scientific computing resources to our faculty, students, and regional partners," says John Porter, vice president for information systems and technology. "With the support of the National Science Foundation and our excellent relationship with SGI, we are now extraordinarily well-prepared to follow the path of our research into the decade that lies ahead.
As a regional center, mariner will offer training and access on the Origin2000 and will create and maintain a Web-based respository of training materials, benchmark data, and software tools. The University will also act as a testing site for new software developed by Alliance teams.
Department of computer science researchers will work to develop new technologies to improve network performance, including development of a Java-based simulation of computer networks that can test, refine, and deploy scheduling and load-balancing techniques to enhance distributed computing.
A Boston University team led by Roscoe Giles, ENG associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, will develop network-based educational activities for undergraduates. Giles also serves as one of two coordinators nationwide for Education and Outreach under the NSF Partners for Computational Services (PACI) initiative, the funding organization of the Alliance. He is responsible for coordinating the national effort aimed at school audiences at the K-12, undergraduate, and graduate levels, as well as outreach to underserved populations.
Further information about the NSF PACI program, the Alliance, and Boston University's role as an Alliance partner can be found at the following Web sites: http://ccs.bu.edu/ or http://alliance.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ or http://alliance.ncsa.uiuc.edu/partnering/boston.html.