Contact: Joe Farris
Mississippi State University leads a national team of academic institutions and industry partners that will support the four Department of Defense high-performance computing research centers, two of which are in Mississippi.
The MSU-led team won the record-setting $108 million, eight-year contract in technical competition with other university and industry groups seeking to work with the Defense Department's High Performance Computing Modernization Program. The contract was signed May 25 in Washington, D.C.
Researchers from MSU and partner universities will be based on the campuses and also at three of the four major high-performance computing facilities that serve Defense Department researchers nationwide.
Those centers are the Army Engineering Research and Development Center at Vicksburg, the Naval Oceanographic Office at Stennis Space Center on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and the Air Force Aeronautical Systems Center in Dayton, Ohio.
The national university-industry team is headed by Joe Thompson, distinguished professor of aerospace engineering at MSU, and includes researchers from Ohio State, Florida State, and the universities of Illinois, Texas, Tennessee, and California-San Diego. The team also includes the Ohio Supercomputer Center and five minority-serving institutions, including Jackson State.
Industry partners that will subcontract with MSU to help with the project are Computer Sciences Corporation and SAIC.
The contract awarded to MSU is one of the largest in Defense Department history for academic research and "serves notice to the country that Mississippi is a player in high-performance computing," Thompson said.
With two of its four main computing facilities-or Major Shared Resource Centers, as Defense calls them-located at Vicksburg and Stennis Space Center, 40 percent of the department's supercomputing power is located in Mississippi, which ranks third among the states in high-performance computing capacity. Mississippi State's Engineering Research Center is among the nation's 10 most powerful academic supercomputing sites.
"Mississippi State's national leadership role in a program of this significance is huge in terms of visibility for the State of Mississippi," said MSU President Malcolm Portera. "It demonstrates to prospective industry and others that there is technological capacity here that simply isn't found in the states around us. And I am convinced that technological capacity represents a key element in development in the New Economy."
University researchers participating in what is formally known as the Programming Environment and Training activity will work side-by-side with Defense Department scientists in 10 broad computational technology areas and five other technical areas. The MSU-led consortium will provide university expertise in seven of the 10 major computational areas and four of the five technical areas.
Examples of the computational technology areas are climate, weather and ocean modeling and simulation, one of three areas in which the Naval Oceanographic Office at Stennis Space Center has a leadership role, and computational fluid dynamics, one of four areas assigned for leadership to the Army Engineering R&D Center at Vicksburg.
Using supercomputers 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 even the human circulatory system.
The expertise developed over the past 10 years in the university's National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center, which focuses on supercomputing applications, made it possible for MSU to assume national leadership in the field, Thompson said.
Bharat Soni, MSU professor of aerospace engineering and director of the Center for Computational Systems in the ERC, leads the largest of the 11 technical areas to be supported by the team, heading the effort in computational fluid dynamics.
"Mississippi State is one of the few universities in the country that could be presumptuous enough even to attempt to put together such an effort or be positioned to manage it," Thompson said. "The purpose of the program is to bring top-level university research talent together to work side by side with Defense scientists and research engineers to increase their productivity. Without top talent, you couldn't possibly win a contract like this."
The two other teams in the final round of competition for the contract were led by corporations, with university partners. One of those teams will work with the fourth major high-performance computing center, the Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Md.
Among the organizations making up the MSU team are two of the three supercomputing centers supported by the National Science Foundation-the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California-San Diego. Two of the 11 technical area leaders are members of the National Academy of Engineering.
"The fact that such major players as these in high-performance computing have the confidence to bet their success on Mississippi State's leadership is significant," Thompson said.
The new contract, funded at approximately $13.5 million a year, will enhance the state's role in high-performance computing and give Mississippi State an extra boost toward its goal of ranking among the nation's top 50 public universities in research expenditures within three years.
MSU currently ranks 58th, based on 1998-99 expenditures of about $111 million. Expenditures for 1999-2000 were approximately $132 million and expenditures for the year ending on June 30 are estimated at $145 million.
Minority-serving institutions on the MSU-led team, in addition to Jackson State, are Clark Atlanta University, Florida International, the University of Hawaii, and Central State University in Ohio. Jackson State Vice President for Information Technology Willie Brown coordinates JSU's involvement in the project.
The new initiative within the High Performance Computing Modernization Program is a major expansion of an activity that began in 1995 when the four Major Shared Resource Centers were designated.
Since then, Mississippi State has been part of a team providing research support on a smaller scale to the main high-performance computing facilities at Vicksburg, the Air Force Aeronautical Systems Center in Ohio, and the Army Research Laboratory in Maryland. A different team currently works with the Naval Oceanographic Office at Stennis Space Center.
For more information: Dr. Joe Thompson, Project Director, 662-325-7299.
Web sites for additional information:
--DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP): http://www.hpcmo.hpc.mil/
--PET in HPCMP (click on PET Information): http://www.hpcmo.hpc.mil/Htdocs/PET/index.html
--The Major Shared Resource Centers (MSRCs): (click on Major Shared Resource Centers): http://www.hpcmo.hpc.mil/Htdocs/MSRC/index.html
--The two MSRCs in Mississippi:
+NAVO (Stennis Space Center): http://www.navo.hpc.mil/
+ERDC (Vicksburg): http://www.wes.hpc.mil/
--The Engineering Research Center (ERC) at Mississippi State: http://www.erc.msstate.edu/