| Who we are . . . The Supercomputing Institute for Digital Simulation and Advanced Computation is an interdisciplinary research program spanning all colleges of the University of Minnesota. The Supercomputing Institute 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 Supercomputing Institute 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. Supercomputing research is defined broadly to include a variety of research activities from many disciplines. This research involves the use of high-performance computing environments to address problems in the physical, biological, medical, mathematical, and computing sciences and engineering as well as other fields that use computers in their research. The goal is to promote successful attacks on problems that could not otherwise be attempted. Such efforts often result in domain-specific algorithms and codes that exploit the available computing environments as well as visualization techniques to enhance insight, make displays more informative, and add multimedia values for communications and work environments. In many other cases, these research activities may involve research aimed at the design or evaluation of high-performance computing hardware, operating systems, networking, and general-purpose algorithms and software. In most cases the goal of the work is application of high-performance computing in one or more fields of science and engineering. The Supercomputing Institute's hardware and software resources and technical support are available to researchers at the University of Minnesota and other post-secondary educational institutions in the State of Minnesota. In addition, the Supercomputing Institute organizes and hosts symposia, workshops, seminars, and tutorials and coordinates other educational and collaborative activities to promote supercomputing research, increase university-industry collaboration, and promote technology transfer. Further information about our facilities and programs can be found in our Annual Research Report - http://www.msi.umn.edu/general/Reports/annual.html . . . where we've been . . .In 1981, the University of Minnesota was the first U.S. University to acquire a supercomputer (a Cray-1). The Supercomputing Institute was created in 1984 to provide leading edge high-performance computing resources to the University of Minnesota's research community. Earlier supercomputing resources offered to the University of Minnesota research community have included a Cray-2, an ETA 10, a Cray X-MP, an IBM 3090, a Cray M90, a Cray T3D, a Cray C90, a Cray T3E-900, various IBM SP machines with Silvernodes, WinterHawk nodes, and NightHawk nodes, and an SGI Origin 2000 with R12000 nodes. . . . our current machine configuration . . .The Supercomputing Institute currently provides supercomputing resource allocations and technical support for an IBM BladeCenter LS20 Linux cluster, an IBM Power4, an IBM Netfinity Linux cluster, an SGI Altix shared-memory system, and an SGI Altix XE 1300 Linux cluster. For more information on the supercomputers, see: . . . support we provide . . . The User Support staff provides assistance with all aspects of scientific computing and visualization. This assistance includes -- but is not limited to -- general user support, writing and porting serial and parallel codes to the supercomputers, development of scripts or user-friendly procedures to allow more productive use of the supercomputing resources, assistance with visualization or communications, assistance with software packages, tutorials on specialized topics or programs, user training, code optimization, parallel model building support, and assistance with workstations used to develop code for the supercomputers. The Institute has available a wide variety of software packages installed on its resources. For more information regarding software available on each resource, see http://www.msi.umn.edu/cgi-bin/soft/index.html Each member of the User Support Staff can provide technical assistance in their area of expertise. The areas of expertise include Computational Chemistry, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Structural Mechanics, Design Optimization, Structural and Molecular Biology, Data Mining, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Genomics, Proteomics, Scientific Visualization, and Geophysics. For more information on user support, see: http://www.msi.umn.edu/user_support/userstaff.html . . . our laboratories and programs . . .In addition, the Supercomputing Institute supports a diversified array of computing laboratories, collaborations, and programs. These include the Basic Sciences Computing Laboratory, the Scientific Development and Visualization Laboratory, the Biomedical Modeling, Simulation, and Design Laboratory, the Computational Genetics Laboratory, the Scientific Data Management Laboratory, and interdisciplinary Ph.D. programs in Scientific Computing and Computational Neuroscience. . . . and our goal.The goal of all of these efforts is to foster state-of-the-art research, interdisciplinary collaboration, and university/industry collaboration by providing Minnesota researchers with access to advanced facilities for digital computing, visualization, and networking. |