The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is part of a national team of academic institutions and industry partners that was awarded a $108 million contract to work side-by-side with Department of Defense (DoD) researchers in 11 technical areas with broad
scientific and defense applications.

Led by Mississippi State University, the Ohio Supercomputer Center, and SDSC, the consortium will begin contract work on June 1, 2001, with a three-year basic contract and up to five one-year extension options.

The Programming Environment and Training (PET) consortium will work with the
DoD's High Performance Computing Modernization Program to provide research
expertise, education and training, and technical support for computing
resources. SDSC researchers will be leading efforts in education, outreach
and training (EOT) and enabling technologies

"We are very excited about winning this award. We have enjoyed working with
DoD researchers over the past few years, and this award ensures that our
team will play a very large role in working with them to push scientific and
technology frontiers for the next eight years," said Jay Boisseau, a co-PI
on the proposal and the associate director for Scientific Computing at SDSC.
"This award represents proof of our team's past successes and also DoD's
confidence in our abilities to contribute world-class computational
expertise to leading-edge scientific research."

The contract is one of the largest in DoD history for academic research and
builds on SDSC's involvement over the past five years with the PET program
of the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVO) Major Shared Resource Center. The
new consortium will work with the Army Engineering Research and Development
Center at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and the Air Force Aeronautical Systems
Center in Dayton, Ohio, as well as NAVO.

Reagan Moore of SDSC will be leading Enabling Technologies activities for
the team. Don Frederick of SDSC will be leading the EOT effort by organizing
workshops and training classes, including distance learning, on topics of
interest to DoD scientists, such as parallelization of codes and access grid
technologies. "Our role is to promote research and support for the DoD users
both at DoD sites and at distributed sites around the country," Frederick
said.

The computational areas targeted by the PET program include climate,
weather, and ocean modeling, and computational fluid dynamics. Using
high-performance computers 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 the human circulatory
system.

Led by project director Joe Thompson of Mississippi State, the consortium
also includes researchers from Ohio State University, Florida State
University, the University of Illinois, the University of Texas, the
University of Tennessee, Jackson State University in Mississippi, Clark
Atlanta University, Florida International University, the University of
Hawaii, and Central State University in Ohio. Industry partners that will
subcontract to help with the project are Computer Sciences Corporation and
SAIC.

SDSC is sponsored by the National Science
Foundation through NPACI and by other federal agencies, the State and
University of California, and private organizations.