Inferring the causes of disease, tracking the survival of the human race, and enabling natural-language searches of video are just a few of the topics being tackled right here in Pittsburgh at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Join us as we explore how the center uses big data and data analytics to better understand challenging problems.

As the center's Director of Strategic Applications, Dr. Nick Nystrom and his team develop hardware and software architectures to enable groundbreaking research, engaging in research and collaborations across diverse disciplines. At Café Sci, Nystrom will discuss researchers' use of PSC's newest resources, including "Bridges."

"Bridges" is a data-intensive high-performance computing (HPC) system designed to empower new research communities, bring desktop convenience to HPC, expand campus access, and help researchers facing challenges in Big Data to work more intuitively. Funded by a $9.65 million National Science Foundation award, Bridges consists of three tiers of large-shared-memory resources, dedicated nodes for database, web, and data transfer purposes, high-performance shared and distributed data storage, powerful new CPUs and GPUs, and the new, uniquely powerful interconnection network. From a software perspective, Bridges supports widely-used data analytic software such as R, Java, Python, and MATLAB, integration of Spark and Hadoop with HPC, and virtualization.

Nystrom will discuss the importance of converging Big Data and HPC and how Bridges is bringing HPC to nontraditional users and research communities.

Nystrom is also a research physicist in the Department of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Chemistry, Math, and Physics and a PhD in Computational Chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh.

Recorded on Monday, March 7, 2016 at Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, PA.

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