The Interactive High Performance Computing Laboratory, celebrating
its 12th year of hosting cluster computing resources and cutting-edge
research for the GT community, has announced its newest facility. 
Building upon a long history of industry and federal support, Intel has
generously seeded a new multi-core computing environment for both
education and research.  With additional support from the Office of the
Senior Vice Provost for Research and the Chair of the School of
Computer Science, this facility is now available for the wider campus
community.

"Multi-core computing has forced us to go back to the
basics," says Matthew Wolf, director of IHPCL and research faculty with
a joint appointment between the School of Computer Science and Oak
Ridge National Laboratory.  This rethinking not only applies to the
basics of computer science, like schedulers, I/O systems, and parallel
languages, but also to the way that we train students in sciences and
engineering to think about using their machines.

Karsten Schwan,
founding director of IHPCL and current director of the Center for
Experimental Research in Computer Systems, further focuses on the
innovative approach Georgia Tech has taken towards multi-core
education.  "Rather than try to fit all of the multi-core training in
one lonely course in the senior year, a team of CS and ECE faculty
within CERCS has been working hard to find ways to expose students to
multi-core repeatedly throughout the curriculum.  Resources like IHPCL
provide the vital link between the Institute's research mission and the
mission of training the next generation of computer scientists and
engineers."

The new facilities are focused at several levels,
and faculty are encouraged to inquire about availability of resources
for courses requiring parallel and/or multi-core environments, as well
as seed proposal requests for time to start undergraduate or graduate
thesis projects in the broader high performance computing context.