News

William Kramer, Blue Waters Deputy Project Director, NCSA, gave a presentation at MSI on Friday, February 25, 10 am - 12 pm, in 402 Walter Library. The topic of the presentation was the Blue Waters architecture and how to submit a successful PRAC proposal.

MSI’s newest HPC resource, Koronis, is now operational and we are accepting proposals for its use. See our press release for more information about the Koronis system. Koronis users must have NIH funding or be performing research that will lead to an NIH grant proposal. See the Koronis webpage for complete proposal instructions.

The December 18 issue of The Economist highlights the work being done by the not-for-profit Planetary Skin Institute (PSI), created by Cisco Systems and NASA, on measurement of the extent and health of the world's forests. Key to that effort has been the data-mining work led by Professor Vipin Kumar (MSI Fellow, Computer Science and Engineering). Professor Kumar and his collaborators participated in the United Nations recent climate change conference in Cancun and gave a joint presentation there with the PSI and NASA.

The EOLOS consortium led by the University of Minnesota and supported by a US Department of Energy grant has a new website (http://www.eolos.umn.edu/) up. The consortium was established to create collaboration between universities, government organizations, and industry in hopes of learning more about wind powered energy. Members of the consortium have used MSI’s Itasca supercomputer to perform simulations of turbine flow and modeling of the atmosphere.

MSI, and more specifically, our Itasca supercomputer, was recently featured on a television program called "The Global Learning Series.” In the video you will see former MSI Director Tom Jones, as well as University of Minnesota chemistry professor and MSI Fellow, Darrin York, talk about the development of computers over time, the importance of supercomputing at a research institution and how modern supercomputers work. The program will be used as interstitial programming on a network of 349 public television stations across the country.  

Intel has recently released a case study about their Xeon processors and software-development products that spotlights MSI. The study discusses our two newest systems, Itasca and Koronis. Koronis will be available to users later this year.

Professor and MSI Fellow Vipin Kumar (Computer Science and Engineering) will be leading an interdisciplinary team from the University of Minnesota and other universities nationwide in a $10 million NSF project to study climate change. Professor Kumar's group uses MSI resources to develop the high-performance data-mining algorithms used in this research. The supercomputers are necessary because of the huge size of the datasets involved. The UMNews story has further details.

On July 31, 2010, Professor Tom Jones, Department of Astronomy and MSI Fellow, stepped down after serving as MSI Interim Director for two years.

During Summer 2010, MSI hosted two courses for grad students and postdocs in association with the Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering (VSCSE) of the Center for Computational Science (Miami, Florida). The VSCSE brings together faculty from throughout the country to create courses that focus on petascale computing and petascale-enabled science and engineering. MSI hosted Petascale Programming Environments and Tools (July 6-9, 2010) and Big Data for Science (July 26-30, 2010).