Council on Academic Computing
June 18, 2008
Meeting Summary
Center for Simulation
and Modeling
The
Center for Simulation and Modeling will support computationally intensive
research across the University. The Center will draw faculty and staff members from
a wide range of disciplines, including astronomy, biology, chemistry,
economics, engineering, and medicine. It
will provide access to hardware, such as computers at the Center for Molecular
and Materials Simulations or on PittGrid; provide
technical support, primarily in the area of parallel computing; sponsor and
coordinate courses in advanced computing; and support a lecture series on
topics related to advanced computing. The
Center for Simulation and Modeling will be formally established on October
24. The event will include two workshops
and a poster session.
Grid Computing
Grid
computing began as a mechanism to link supercomputers, enabling them to share
unused resources. The concept has been
extended to include resource sharing across any type of networked
environment. Currently, many of the
University’s computing processors are only available to individuals who are
located where the resources reside. PittGrid organizes these resources and makes them available
for research, simulations, and computationally demanding projects. The
aggregate power of several hundred machines is channeled to provide high
computational power for people who have computationally intensive jobs. Current partners include the
Report from
Computing Services and Systems Development
Jinx Walton, Director of Computing Services and Systems
Development, discussed the effect of internet spam on the University. University graduates are permitted to
maintain an e-mail account for one year after graduation, but their e-mail does
not pass through the University’s spam filter.
Many of the former students forward e-mail from their University account
to another provider. Spam that would
have been caught by the University’s spam filter is then redirected to the
provider. As a result, the University has
been flagged as a spam source several times.
CSSD is working to correct this problem.
They may resolve it by including the graduates’ accounts under those
covered by the spam filter.
Ms. Walton also discussed several other topics: