Twenty years ago—on Jan. 17, 1986—the National Science Board approved funding for the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), a joint effort of Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University, together with Westinghouse Electric Co.

As the fifth supercomputing center to be approved through a National Science Foundation (NSF) initiative, PSC came into the supercomputing world running to catch up. By April 1986, with a staff of a dozen people, PSC had installed and tested its first system, the then-state-of-the-art Cray X-MP. Researchers were using it only three months after the ink had dried on the NSF contract.

Two decades later, the original five NSF-funded supercomputing centers have been decreased to three. And PSC is solidly established as one of the world’s leading centers in implementing high-performance computing technologies as tools for science and engineering research.

Today, personal computers boast as much power as PSC’s original X-MP. The center’s newest system, the Cray XT3—nicknamed Big Ben (pictured) in honor of Ben Franklin and Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger—is more than 10,000 times as powerful as that X-MP, with a computing capability that exceeds 60 teraflops (60 trillion calculations per second).

What hasn’t changed is PSC’s ability to get things done. In 2005, the center’s Big Ben—a massively parallel system comprising 2,090 processors—was tested and optimized, and began serving U.S. scientists and engineers as a production resource of the TeraGrid, the NSF’s program to provide national cyberinfrastructure for education and research. Built over the last four years, the TeraGrid is the world’s largest, most comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research.

The PSC research has produced many significant results, including the following:

• Pioneering air-pollution studies for the Los Angeles air basin that influenced federal legislation;
• The first three-dimensional model of blood flow in the heart;
• An accurate forecast of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9’s impact with Jupiter;
• Modeling of earthquake soil vibration in unprecedented detail;
• Protein modeling that contributed to the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; and
• Development of dramatically improved ability to forecast severe storms.
PSC is supported by several federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and private industry.