Mississippi State University News Bureau (662) 325-3442Contact: Joe Farris[email protected]http://www.ur.msstate.edu/news/
Mississippi State University leads team to support Defense supercomputing
STARKVILLE, Miss. (May 25, 2001)--Mississippi State University leads a national team of academic institutions and industry partners that will support the four Department of Defense high-performance computing research centers.
The universities will work with the Defense Department's High Performance Computing Modernization Program under a $108 million, eight-year contract.
Researchers from Mississippi State and partner universities will be based on the campuses and also at three of the four major high-performance computing facilities that serve Defense Department researchers nationwide.
Those centers are the Army Engineering Research and Development Center at Vicksburg, the Naval Oceanographic Office at Stennis Space Center on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and the Air Force Aeronautical Systems Center in Dayton, Ohio.
The national university-industry team is headed by Joe Thompson, distinguished professor of aerospace engineering at Mississippi State, and includes researchers from Ohio State, Florida State, and the universities of Illinois, Texas, Tennessee, and California-San Diego. The team also includes the Ohio Supercomputer Center and five minority-serving institutions. The contract is one of the largest in Defense Department history for academic research. Industry partners that will subcontract to help with the project are Computer Sciences Corporation and SAIC.
The new agreement builds on expertise developed over the past 10 years in the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center at Mississippi State, which focuses on supercomputing applications, Thompson said. Mississippi State's Engineering Research Center is among the nation's 10 most powerful academic supercomputing sites.
University researchers participating in what is formally known as the Programming Environment and Training activity will work side-by-side with Defense Department scientists in 10 broad computational technology areas and five other technical areas. The Mississippi State-led consortium will provide university expertise in seven of the 10 major computational areas and four of the five technical areas.
Examples of the computational technology areas are climate, weather and ocean modeling and simulation, one of three areas in which the Naval Oceanographic Office at Stennis Space Center has a leadership role, and computational fluid dynamics, one of four areas assigned for leadership to the Army Engineering R&D Center at Vicksburg.
Using supercomputers to simulate the earth's climate has applications in flight safety, search and rescue planning, and submarine warfare, among other areas. In the computational fluid dynamics area, supercomputers are used to model fluid and gas flows around aircraft, missiles, and submarines, for example, or flow in air circulation systems or even the human circulatory system.
Bharat Soni, MSU professor of aerospace engineering and director of the Center for Computational Systems in the ERC, leads the largest of the 11 technical areas to be supported by the team, heading the effort in computational fluid dynamics.
The two other teams in the final round of competition for the contract were led by corporations, with university partners. One of those teams will work with the fourth major high-performance computing center, the Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Md. Minority-serving institutions on the team are Jackson State University in Mississippi, Clark Atlanta University, Florida International, the University of Hawaii, and Central State University in Ohio.
With two of its four main computing facilities, or Major Shared Resource Centers, located in Mississippi, the state claims 40 percent of the Defense Department's supercomputing power and ranks third among the states in supercomputing capacity, Thompson said.
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For more information: Dr. Joe Thompson, Project Director, Mississippi State, 662-325-7299
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