The Interactive High Performance Computing Laboratory, celebratingits 12th year of hosting cluster computing resources and cutting-edgeresearch for the GT community, has announced its newest facility. Building upon a long history of industry and federal support, Intel hasgenerously seeded a new multi-core computing environment for botheducation and research. With additional support from the Office of theSenior Vice Provost for Research and the Chair of the School ofComputer Science, this facility is now available for the wider campuscommunity.

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

Karsten Schwan,founding director of IHPCL and current director of the Center forExperimental Research in Computer Systems, further focuses on theinnovative approach Georgia Tech has taken towards multi-coreeducation. "Rather than try to fit all of the multi-core training inone lonely course in the senior year, a team of CS and ECE facultywithin CERCS has been working hard to find ways to expose students tomulti-core repeatedly throughout the curriculum. Resources like IHPCLprovide the vital link between the Institute's research mission and themission of training the next generation of computer scientists andengineers."

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