Kansas Center for Advanced Scientific Computing (KCASC)

Historical Development

The Kansas Center for Advanced Scientific Computing (KCASC) is a statewide interdisciplinary research infrastructure initially funded in April 1996 by the NSF EPSCoR Cooperative Agreement through the Kansas EPSCoR program. It has the following main initial objectives:

• To establish a multiprocessor supercomputing system for supporting advanced computational research in science and engineering.
  
• To foster advanced computational technology transfer and research interactions across diverse disciplines.
  
• To enhance the computational technology in the State of Kansas to nationally and internationally competitive levels.
  
• Education and training of students in high performance computing.
  

The initial KCASC participants consist of 22 faculty members from chemistry, physics, mathematics, and several engineering departments at Univ. of Kansas (KU), Kansas State University (KSU), and Wichita State University (WSU). In December 1996, the Kansas Board of Regents approved the establishment of the Center for Advanced Scientific Computing (CASC) at KU as a formal state research organization.

In January 1997, a 16-processor SGI Origin2000 mid-range supercomputing system was acquired and placed at the computer center at KU. At the time of installation, the KCASC computing system, called "heron", was ranked 40th among the most powerful computer systems in the US academic institutions. Heron is also the first supercomputer system at the State of Kansas and at KU.

In August 1999, CASC at KU has received a major NSF MRI grant and substantial matching from KU for supercomputer upgrade. The new system, installed in the spring of 2000, has 64 new Origin2400 processors and 16 GB main memory. MRI grant participants include faculty members from 12 departments in natural sciences, biosciences, mathematics, engineering, and natural history of museum. The KU computer center has provided both hard dollar match and system maintenance.

The Origin2400 system is an all purpose supercomputer and has the capability of performing both shared and distributed memory parallel computing at the same time. Since 1996, the heron system has served as a major supercomputing resource for state-of-the-art computational researches in sciences, mathematics, and engineering in the State of Kansas and at KU.

Interdisciplinary Activities Sponsored by KCASC

In addition to the establishment of the multiprocessor supercomputing system, KCASC has also sponsored several interdisciplinary activities:

• Weekly KCASC interdisciplinary seminar series. Since 1996, over 120 visitors from leading national and international institutions have visited KCASC and KU and delivered lectures on frontier computational technology and its applications to various disciplines in chemistry, physics, mathematics, biosciences, and engineering.
  
• KCASC Distinguished Lecture series. Since 1992, both KITCS (Kansas Institute for Theoretical and Computational Science) and KCASC have sponsored a distinguished lecture series to invite world-class scholars (including Nobel laureates and directors of national supercomputer centers) to deliver public lectures on recent scientific discoveries or technology breakthrough to stimulate frontier theoretical and computational research in Kansas and at KU.
  
• Parallel computing training workshops
  
• Multidisciplinary collaborative researches in computational sciences and engineering.
  

Other Impacts

Since the formation of KCASC in 1996, the center has had a significant impact on the computational research infrastructures in Kansas. In addition to the formation of CASC supercomputing site at KU, KCASC has stimulated the formation of other new supercomputing sites at KSU and WSU. The KCASC impact, however, is not limited to the state. In 1998, KCASC has fostered the initiation of two other major NSF EPSCoR projects: (a) the six-Great Plains-States Network (6-GPN) project, and (b) the partnership with the National Computational Science Alliance at the University of Illinois.

Contact

For more information about KCASC, please contact Professor Shih-I Chu, KCASC Director, at sichu@ku.edu.