MSU ranked 20th in supercomputing

Already a leader in catfish and cotton, Mississippi also is earning a national ranking for something that usually is associated with more urban settings.

The state now ranks third--behind New Mexico and California--for supercomputing. The statistics recently were published in the 11th edition of "TOP500," a list of the world's most powerful supercomputer sites compiled twice yearly by researchers at the universities of Mannheim (Germany) and Tennessee.

Mississippi State is on the list for the first time, ranking 20th in the nation and fourth in the Southeast for supercomputing power. The listing includes supercomputers used by research institutions, government agencies and industry.

"Mississippi provides 41 percent of the high performance computing power for the Defense Department, with two of its four Shared Resource Centers located in the state," said Dr. Joe Thompson of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center.

He said the recent addition of a supercomputer to the ERC inventory helped put the university on the TOP500 list for the first time.

A professor of aerospace engineering, Thompson is a member of President Clinton's Advisory Committee for High Performance Computing and Communications, Information Technology and the Next Generation Internet.

ERC director Don Trotter, Thompson's colleague and a professor of electrical and computer engineering, said installation of the new 32-processor SUN Ultra HPC 10000 unit "brought MSU onto the list at No. 326 among supercomputing sites in the world.

"The supercomputer has approximately 1,000 times more memory than the average PC," he said. "If you wrote everything in its memory on paper, it would take 6.5 million sheets, or roughly enough to reach from Starkville to Salt Lake City, Utah."

The ERC's Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory is the primary user of the new computer system. Computer codes developed by the laboratory have been selected by the Navy for use in the construction of its ships.