Students and faculty in the Scientific Computing Program at Wayne State University now have a modern advanced classroom facility and training laboratory where they can study natural phenomena and develop software tools to solve problems in science, engineering, and medicine.

The new High Performance Computing (HPC) Instructional and Research Laboratory will be unveiled at an open house on Wednesday, March 6, 9 a.m. - noon in room 313 State Hall. Remarks will be at 10:30 a.m.

The facility was funded by National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, SunMicrosystems, Inc., International Business Machines (IBM) Corp. and the university.

The new classroom/laboratory is part of Wayne State's Institute for Scientific Computing (ISC). It will further education and interdisciplinary research opportunities that require high-performance computing. The HPC lab is equipped with 25 dual-processor IBM Pentium III workstations with diverse graphic capabilities for students, a powerful projection system built into the ceiling, a 64-processor Sun Netra cluster, and a pair of powerful Sun Fire 6800 servers.

In addition, six other Sun parallel servers, including a powerful Sun E6500, make this a 154-processor cluster. By configuring the computers and servers into a multi-processor cluster, idle CPU time can be used for compute-intensive or real-time computing on interdisciplinary research in science, engineering, and medicine.

This high performance computing infrastructure will enable the various multi-disciplinary research groups within the ISC to solve cutting-edge problems that were not possible earlier," said Vipin Chaudhary, ISC director and associate professor in WSU's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. "The research growth potential due to such resources is tremendous. The students benefit most. It gives them the hands-on experience in this growing domain. I do not know of any university that has such an infrastructure dedicated to interdisciplinary training."

ISC faculty members and staff in the College of Science, the computer science department, and the Advanced Computing Group of Computing & Information Technology's research services department worked together to plan and configure the HPC lab.

"The overall goal of the Institute for Scientific Computing is to assisting developing interdisciplinary programs to facilitate research in the emerging area that is scientific computing," said Bill Hase, ISC associate director of research and interim chairman of WSU's computer science department.

Evelyn Goldfield, ISC associate director of programs and associate professor (research), led the development of the institute's NSF-IGERT curriculum program, which integrates ongoing research efforts into a cooperative traineeship program that has the active support of major corporations, particularly Ford, IBM, Sun, and CFD Research. Scientists from these and other companies participate in lectures, research training, and oversight/assessment of projects.

ISC research is being conducted currently in the areas of automotive and aerospace systems, chemistry, physics and novel materials, high performance computing, traffic flow and transportation, data mining, and medicine, genetics, and biochemistry.

To register for the open house and continental breakfast for Wayne State's newest instructional and research facility, call Doris King at (313) 577-9038.

Wayne State University is a premier institution of higher education offering more than 350 academic programs through 14 schools and colleges to more than 31,000 students in metropolitan Detroit.