The San Diego Supercomputing Centre (SDSC) has made one of its powerful parallel clusters available to scientists, engineers, students and other researchers across the USA. As one of six National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded supercomputing centres, the facility provides high performance computing systems, tools and support at no cost to researchers.
The 128-processor Sun cluster is already being tapped by dozens of researchers and students to accelerate scientific discovery. Researchers at the University of Maryland are using the system to do 4D MRI medical image processing in a quest to improve radiation therapies, and post-doctorate students at the University of California San Diego are processing images of eyes to help find cures for glaucoma.
Parallel programming would normally be too difficult for most researchers, so SDSC has deployed Star-P from Interactive Supercomputing to allow them to make use of the cluster using their familiar desktop tools such as Matlab, Python or R.