WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind., Nov. 2 -- Purdue University has been selected as one of five High Performance Computing Operations centers, and will receive a $1.7 million grant to go with the distinction.

The National Science Foundation awarded the designation and funds. Purdue will use the money to help expand the nation's growing use of collaborative computing tools in science.

Other HPC-Ops centers have been established at Louisiana State University, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Champaign, Ill., the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and at Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin.

The Purdue HPC-Ops resources will be provided in the NSF-funded TeraGrid. The Purdue HPC-Ops Center will focus on three areas:

• Scientists will be able to run computing jobs using Purdue's distributed computing system, BoilerGrid. BoilerGrid uses Condor distributed computing scheduling software developed at the University of Wisconsin. Purdue is the largest academic Condor pool in the world. The computing cycles gleaned from the system are made available via the NSF's TeraGrid computing network.
  
  
• A resource that renders scientific animations and visualizations using distributed resources on the TeraGrid. The TeraDRE (for TeraGrid Distributed Rendering Environment) allows computer graphics professionals to inexpensively produce scientific animations in hours that would take days or weeks to produce using standard computers.
  
  
• A resource that will serve as a "sandbox" for IT research scientists to explore and test new ways to accelerate science computing applications.

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Source: Steve Tally, Purdue University