Aerospace prof appointed to national computing panel

President Bill Clinton named a Mississippi State aerospace engineering professor to a panel that is working to improve the nation's high-performance computing capabilities.

Thompson

Joe Thompson, a Giles Distinguished Professor, joins nearly 20 others on the Advisory Committee on High-Performance Computing and Communications, Information Technology, and the Next Generation Internet.

At its first meeting in February, the committee will begin work on the Next Generation Internet Initiative announced by the president last year. Members also will examine a range of issues in high performance computing, networking and related areas.

Made up of university and industry experts, the committee includes the director of Rice University's Center for Research on Parallel Computation, who will co-chair the group with the research vice president at Sun Microsystems Inc. Among others are representatives of MCI Communications, Hughes Electronics Corp., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Stanford University, Silicon Graphics, AT&T Labs, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Thompson recently testified before Congress in support of NGI, a multi-agency effort that includes the Defense, Commerce and Energy departments, as well as NASA and the National Science Foundation.

The Clinton administration is requesting $300 million to implement the improved Internet capability and foster greater research and teaching collaborations. Administration officials say today's high-speed computing system is slowed by tremendous usage.

A Grenada native and Mississippi State alumnus, Thompson serves as special assistant for the research vice president in high performance computing.

In 1990, he led in establishing a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulation at MSU.

Conducting multidisciplinary research in computational engineering and microelectronics, it is one of only 26 NSF-supported engineering research centers in the nation.