NSF Award
9214215
This award provides funds to the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center (PSC) to aid in the purchase of a massively parallel computer (Cray T3D). The purchase is part of a project that includes operations and systems support of benefit to biological researchers around the country via network access to the PSC. In recent years, efforts to improve the speed of the largest and fastest general purpose computers has focused on the use of so-called "massively parallel" architectures. In these computers, a very large number of processors are interconnected so that complex calculations can be broken into a number of component problems that are solved separately and simultaneously by the processors. The earliest computers of this type employed very large numbers of the relatively slow processors typical of personal computers. The most recent designs, such as the T3D, use a smaller (but still large) number of the very powerful processors typically found in advanced scientific workstations. Although the use of parallel computers for analysis of computationally intensive problems in biology is still in its infancy, many of these problems are well- suited to "parallelization"; the availability of this computer to all researchers through the auspices of the PSC is expected to have a significant impact on understanding of biological problems as diverse as the structures of individual proteins and the function of the nervous system.
