Public Computing on a Super Scale

October 5, 2001 | Source: Wired News

The Terascale Computing System (TCS) at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center — installed on Monday — is the second most powerful computer in the world, after ASCI White at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It offers the greatest computational power available today for public scientific research.

The National Science Foundation, which ponied up the $45 million to buy the hardware and software and keep it running for three years, underwrites the supercomputer time — making teraflop-level number crunching power publicly available to researchers around the country.

The jobs now in line for TCS’ next six months include:

Simulation of blood flow in the human body.

Space weather modeling.

Virtual tests for therapeutic cancer drugs.

Global modeling of the Earth’s magnetosphere.

Simulations of shock waves and eddies in turbulent fluids.

Quantum mechanical calculations in sub-nuclear “Lattice Gauge Theory.”

The large-scale structure of galaxies and galaxy clusters.

Modeling the interaction of proteins within individual cells.

Studying instability and turbulence in plasmas.

Testing models of the formation of cosmological structures.