Media Contact:
Chip Rose, UMBC Science/Tech News
410-455-5793
crose@umbc.edu

Andrew White, longtime leader of supercomputer development at Los Alamos National Laboratory and project manager of the world’s fastest supercomputer “Roadrunner,” is the keynote speaker at “Frontiers of Multicore Computing,” an Aug. 27-28 conference hosted by UMBC. The event will bring to campus academic, government and industry researchers focused on the science applications for the Cell Broadband Engine, IBM’s supercomputer-on-a-chip technology at the heart of the PlayStation3 video game platform.

White was one of the leaders of Roadrunner, which smashed the petaflop barrier in June 2007. If each of the six billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 46 years to do what Roadrunner would do in one day.

Established in 2007 thanks to support from IBM, UMBC’s Multicore Computational Center is using the Cell technology to better predict climate change, model financial markets and provide faster, higher-resolution visualizations for the next generation of healthcare.

The “Frontiers” conference will bring together top supercomputing researchers from across the country, including IBM, MIT, Georgia Tech, NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center, the National Science Foundation, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, the U.S. Army, the University of Wisconsin and many more.

Topics to be covered include multicore computing research in the geosciences, aerospace, defense, interactive digital media and
bioinformatics.