H1N1 Modeling at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Receives Top Supercomputing Award

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) received the 2009 HPCwire Readers’ Choice Award for Top Supercomputing Achievement.

The award recognizes PSC’s work as part of the National Institutes of Health’s Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS), which supports research to simulate disease spread and evaluate intervention strategies.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is a joint effort of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, which partner with Westinghouse Electric Company. Established in 1986, PSC is supported by several federal agencies, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and private industry and is a partner in the National Science Foundation TeraGrid program.

For this study, PSC scientist Shawn Brown (A&S ’95, EDUC ’98G) modeled the spread of the H1N1 virus in various locales, including throughout the United States, in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, and in Allegheny County. The modeling is intended to help policy-makers and public-health officials evaluate the effectiveness of mitigation strategies, such as vaccinations and school closures.

Brown collaborated with the Pittsburgh MIDAS Center of Excellence, led by Donald Burke, dean of Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center-Jonas Salk Chair in Global Health.

HPCwire is a news service for high-performance computing (HPC) and computational science that serves an international community. “This award, which represents a partnership between the HPCwire global readership and our publishing team, is a salute from the global HPC community,” said Tomas Tabor, publisher of HPCwire.