Contact: Maridith Geuder
When Department of Defense officials seek the nation's best minds to solve computer problems related to weapons design--or retrofitting the Pentagon after 9/11--their phone calls often are made to Mississippi State University.
In an effort described by veteran researcher Joe Thompson as "high-end outreach," MSU leads a consortium of 10 universities and two private companies in matching high-performance computing expertise with specific defense research needs.
Known as the Center for DoD Program Environment Training, the project began in 2001 with a record $108 million awarded to Mississippi State through a nationally competitive process. The only university-led group receiving such funding, PET, as it's often called, is the largest competitive research grant ever made to a Mississippi institution of higher learning.
Thompson, a Grenada native with degrees from Mississippi State and Georgia Tech, directs both the project and national consortium. An aerospace engineer, he is among a dozen holding the rank of William L. Giles Distinguished Professor, MSU's highest academic honor.
Defense officials recently affirmed Mississippi State's leadership when they exercised a research contract option for the first of five additional years. The decision, they told Thompson, was based on the university's success during the project's first three years.
"This speaks to Mississippi State's outstanding capabilities in engineering and technical areas and shows the national reputation of our faculty members," said engineering dean Wayne Bennett. The university's supercomputing capabilities currently are "ranked among the top 10 at American universities," he added.
The team's problem-solving often involves computer software issues in 14 highly technical areas that run the gamut from computational fluid dynamics to signal and image processing.
"On a day-to-day basis, we don't necessarily know what we'll be dealing with," Thompson explained. "We're continually called on to address new computer architectures and are challenged both from the expected and the unexpected events of the world."
The MSU-led consortium includes Ohio State University and the Ohio Supercomputer Center, along with the universities of Alabama at Birmingham, Tennessee and Texas. Also taking part are several minority-serving universities, including Jackson State, Florida International, Central State, and Hawaii.
Both in California, corporate team members include SAIC, an international information technology company based in San Diego, and Computer Sciences Corp. of El Segundo.
Thompson said that the combined effort specifically supports supercomputing operations at the Army Engineering Research and Development Center in Vicksburg and Naval Oceanographic Office at Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis. Other Defense Department facilities on the list include the Air Force Aeronautical Systems Center in Dayton, Ohio, and the Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen, Md.
"Mississippi has 40 percent of the defense department's high-performance computing power," Thompson said. "Through PET, we provide technical support on defense issues ranging from the simulation of terrorist events to environmental quality modeling."
While the high-tech outreach is in a relatively new arena, Thompson said the model is a familiar one for Mississippi State.
"Service, along with teaching and research, is an important part of the tripartite land-grant university mission," he said.
For more information about MSU's Center for DoD Program Environment Training, visit http://www.erc.msstate.edu/pet/.