Consortium offers Purdue researchers access to massive computational power
Purdue researchers will have a chance on Sept. 23 to learn about opportunities for research computing and computing education projects related to the Blue Waters petascale computer being built at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
A Purdue seminar on Blue Waters will be held at 10 a.m. in room 121 of the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship, 1201 West State Street in Purdue’s Discovery Park. There will be a question and answer session at 10:45 a.m. Registration is not required. The event is sponsored by ITaP and ITaP’s research and discovery arm the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing.
The featured speaker will be William T.C. Kramer, deputy project director and co-principal investigator for Blue Waters at NCSA. Kramer earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Purdue.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, Blue Waters is expected to be the most powerful supercomputer available for open scientific research when it comes online in 2011. The project includes the NCSA, the University of Illinois, IBM and the Great Lakes Consortium. Purdue is one of the consortium’s 28 members. Gerry McCartney, Purdue vice president for information technology and chief information officer, serves as a consortium board member.
A key element of the Blue Waters project, the consortium of universities, colleges, national research laboratories and other institutions is designed to foster use of petascale computing, among other things through development of new software, applications and technologies. The group’s educational and workforce development program is aimed at making sure advances are passed to the next generation of researchers and applied to frontier questions in science, technology, engineering and the social sciences.
Writer: Greg Kline, science and technology writer, Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), 765-494-8167, gkline@purdue.edu