Council on Academic Computing

December 12, 2002

Meeting Summary

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HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING INITIATIVE

The High Performance Computing Initiative will promote the application of high-performance computing in novel areas and increase awareness of the potential uses of high-speed computing at the University. The program will sponsor three or four awards. The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, which is helping to sponsor the initiative, will give a seminar early in 2003 to explain how the Center can help faculty conduct research.

SOFTWARE AVAILABILITY

Brian Hart attended the meeting for Jinx Walton. He and the Council members discussed software licensing at the University. Computing Services and Systems Development (CSSD) solicits input from faculty at the University, but several factors affect how suggested software purchases will be offered to the University community. First, vendors often offer packages that may exclude certain software, which limits its availability. Second, licensing agreements are not of a uniform type, so CSSD offers software to the community in the most cost-effective manner. Finally, software prices vary according to the platform on which the software runs, which affects cost-effectiveness and, hence, availability.

SUBCOMMITTEE REPORTS

Faculty Portal

The subcommittee will interface between the Council and CSSD as the portal is developed.

Faculty Training

The subcommittee did not meet.

Future of Academic Computing

Members of the Council discussed whether the University could be used as a test case for some of the applications that the computer industry is developing (e.g., self-healing computing, on-the-fly computing, grid computing, and ubiquitous computing).

High Performance Computing Initiative

The subcommittee did not meet.

MISCELLANEOUS

Several other issues were addressed:

• Module 4 of the Research Practice Fundamentals Series
• A recent faculty trip to IBM