News Release

CHAPEL HILL – The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will host users, researchers, vendors and developers of Linux clusters from around the world today (April 25) through Thursday (April 28) as they gather for the Sixth Annual Linux Clusters Institute (LCI) International Conference for high performance computing, "HPC Revolution 2005."

Linux clusters are used in academic research and in a diverse set of industries, including petroleum, geophysics, bioinformatics, aerospace, automotive and finance.

Reflecting the range of uses of clusters, the conference features keynote speakers Kelvin Droegemeier, Roger and Sherry Teigen Presidential professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma; Thom Dunning, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Mark Seager, assistant director for Advanced Technologies within the Computation Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

After a full day today (April 25) of tutorials designed to educate researchers and computing practitioners on the deployment, operation and application of clusters at the Carolina Inn, the conference officially opens at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday (April 26) with Dunning’s address at 8:45 a.m. A full day of programming is scheduled for each day with Droegemeier’s keynote at 8:45 a.m. Wednesday (April 27) and Seager’s at 8:45 a.m. Thursday (April 28).

Dr. Dan Reed, Chancellor’s Eminent Professor and vice chancellor of information technology at UNC-Chapel Hill, recently created the Renaissance Computing Institute, which he directs. The institute’s goal is to bring together researchers and scientists from all industries and leverage high performance computing technology to benefit science and society. Based at UNC-Chapel Hill, the institute is a joint effort with Duke and N.C. State universities.

"Hosting the HPC Revolution 2005 conference in Chapel Hill reflects the importance of scientific computing to Carolina and our role in leading the computing revolution," Reed said. "Advances in Linux clusters and the conference provide an ideal incubator for new applications of this technology."

Conference topics and speakers will address current efforts to integrate and develop science and engineering applications for large-scale clusters to achieve maximum performance and scalability.

Reed said Carolina’s collaborations with peer intuitions and international research communities make it the perfect setting for this conference of technology, science, industry, and academia.

For more information on this week’s conference, visit: http://www.linuxclustersinstitute.org/Linux-HPC-Revolution/. Background on RENCI is available at http://www.renci.org.

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Note: Reed can be reached at dan_reed@unc.edu.

Information Technology Services contact: Megan Bell, (919) 843-9922, megan_bell@unc.edu

News Services contact: Lisa Katz, (919) 962-2093