Corporate Affiliates Program

Corporate IT Strategy Support

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center has over 16 years experience operating an integrated high performance computing environment. PSC systems support technical computing functions such as research and development, engineering, and design in organizations that include government laboratories, academia and industry. Often our systems are used as an integrated part of our customer's in-house systems. Others use them in a stand-alone mode. Through the planning, implementation, and operation of our own facilities, we have encountered and solved many of the problems in providing critical computing support to your technical functions. At a strategic level, we also have the experience to help integrate your technical computing requirements into the overall corporate information architecture, where there is often difficulty in understanding and incorporating the requirements of the technical functions and how they fit with other corporate priorities.

In particular, PSC can help with these areas of concern for corporate technical computing:

• Cost-effective solutions. Most companies look for ways to protect and maximize their current investment in computing systems. PSC has a long history of developing cluster technology that utilizes existing workstation-class machines for high performance computing. In 1999 we developed CLAN, a high performance, dual operating system compute server cluster based on Intel processors. In October 2001, we unveiled the ground-breaking Terascale Computing System. The TCS, developed with HP/Compaq, was a cluster of 750 4-processor alpha-servers capable of a peak speed of 6 teraflops. In implementing these high performance cluster compute systems, we have dealt with many critical technical issues, including batch scheduling, checkpoint/restart, accounting, authentication and security.



• Matching application requirements to hardware, software and network solutions. Most IT solutions today require an integrated solution. All the pieces must fit and work together - servers, software, data management systems, network access. PSC has extensive experience in pulling these pieces together into an efficient system, especially for those applications that require higher performance with respect to speed of execution, data intensity, memory, network bandwidth, etc. For example, PSC's hierarchical data management facility is an integrated system including servers, robot-operated tape silos and the network and software tools to tie it all together. This is transparent to our users, who access it through simple commands. PSC staff are also experts at analyzing the needs of scientific, engineering and datamining applications, then mapping them to today's most advanced computing and communications technologies. These include web-enabled parallel and distributed computing, large scale data management and retrieval solutions, client-server and grid architectures.

• High-performance network solutions. Through the operation of the Advanced Networking group, PSC staff provides engineering support services for connecting to and effectively using high performance wide area networks. PSC networking staff has particular expertise in the implementation, maintenance, tracking and monitoring of network and system security, and in diagnosing and trouble-shooting network connections.

• Technology curve alignment. Many companies have a difficult time in adjusting to the rapid changes in technology - understanding the changes, deciding when to move to the next level, and implementing if they decide to be early adopters. PSC has built a reputation of moving with the technology, as part of our goal to provide the fastest computers as early as possible to our users. We have experience in planning and managing massive system turnovers. We also are able to help with the management of the vendor/ customer relationship.

For further information, please contact the Corporate Relations Office, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, (412) 268-4960 or by e-mail, corp-relations@psc.edu.

HPC Services

Machine cycles, mass storage and networking. In particular, PSC can provide compute cycles for applications which need a periodic scale-up in performance. PSC can be part of a scalable total solution to meet your high performance computing needs.

Application development & parallelization

PSC’s experience with a wide range of parallel applications can help you maximize your application performance.

Collaborative research and model development

In specific application areas, e.g. biomedicine, material science and financial analysis.

IT Strategy Support

PSC systems support technical computing functions such as research and development, engineering, and design in organizations that include government laboratories, academia and industry.

For further information, please contact the Corporate Relations Office, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, (412) 268-4960 or by e-mail, corp-relations@psc.edu.