Notes on the Capabilities and Achievements of the Northeast Parallel
Architectures Center

[ Emphasise very experiences applications oriented staff and braod
facilities and expertise, and connections to other departments and
partners nationally and internationally ]


The Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC) at Syracuse
University is a member site of the Center for Research on Parallel
Computation (CRPC), and is directed by Profesor Geoffrey C Fox.  NPAC
has around 15 core research staff as well as around 25 post graduate
research assistants working in the application and exploitation of HPCC.
In particular NPAC operates the InfoMall technology transfer mechanism
to help its industrial, military and academic partners uptake HPCC
technology and use it.  At present InfoMall has around 50 partner
organisations.

NPAC's world class staff have experience with many HPCC application
areas including: Computational Electromagnetics; Computational Fluid
Dynamics; Climate, Weather and Oceanography simulations; very large
database systems; information access systems; decision support systems;
financial and stock pricing simulations; event-driven and wargaming
simulations; oil and gas reservoir simulations; geographical and
management information systems; reactor and nuclear simulations; 
network optimisation and planning simulations; signal processing and
data compression.  NPAC staff have successfully transferred HPCC
technology in these areas to many organisations.

[Fox can provide better list than I can]

NPAC maintains a broad HPCC development facility of hardware platforms of
shared memory systems as well as distributed memory MIMD and SIMD
platforms.  Current platforms include: IBM SP2; nCUBE; Intel iPSC;
Thinking Machines CM5; MasPar MPP; multiprocessor SGI; DEC Alpha
Cluster with Gigaswitch; and various clusters of SUN, SGI, IBM, and DEC
workstations.

In addition to its in-house facilities, NPAC can draw on the  very large
installations at its CRPC partners sites.

[List these?]

NPAC can draw on expertise at other departments at Syracuse University
such as the Manufacturing, Aeronautical and Mechanical Engineering
Department, and NPAC is also closely affiliated with the Physics and
Computr science departments.  In addition, NPAC has strong ties to HPCC
centres nationally through CRPC and also internationally with several
of NPAC staff originating from HPCC centers in Europe.