IV. TECHNICAL SUPPORT TEAMS

The fundamental mode of operation for PET at the CEWES MSRC is a direct and 
continual connection between the CEWES MSRC PET team universities and the CEWES 
MSRC users in support of the five Computational Technology Areas (CTAs) 
supported at the CEWES MSRC and three related technical infrastructure areas.

This is accomplished through on-site PET team members at the CEWES MSRC in close
communication with PET team members at the supporting universities, who also
make frequent visits to CEWES MSRC. The PET team members on-site at CEWES MSRC
are full-time university personnel in most cases, supplemented by NRC personnel.
The on-site PET team members at the CEWES MSRC are key to the CEWES MSRC PET 
operation, since these team members are the front line of contact with CEWES 
MSRC users. 

These seven on-site team members are

  Lead: Dr Wayne Mastin - NRC (Professor Emeritus of Mississippi State)
  CFD:  Dr Steve Bova - Mississippi State
  CSM:  Dr Rick Weed - Mississippi State
  CWO:  Dr Steve Wornom - Ohio State
  EQM:  Dr Phu Luong - Texas
  SPPT: Dr Clay Breshears - Rice
  SV:   Dr Richard Strelitz - NRC (SAIC)

Also on-site at CEWES MSRC are the overall PET Project Leader - Dr Dick 
Pritchard for part of Year 3 and Ray Burgess as interim - and the Training 
Coordinator, John Eberle, all of NRC. During part of Year 3, Dr Bob Fithen of 
Texas was on-site in support of EQM, but left for an academic career, being
then replaced by Phu Luong. A complete listing of all the CEWES MSRC PET team 
personnel is given in Table 1.

During Year 3, the eight technical support teams in the CEWES MSRC PET effort 
operated as follows:


CFD: Computational Fluid Dynamics CTA 
     (ERC-Mississippi State)

CFD support in the PET effort at CEWES MSRC is the responsibility of the NSF 
Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulation at Mississippi 
State University. During the third contract year, the CFD support team consisted
of Dr David Huddleston (academic leader), Dr Steve Bova (on-site leader), Dr 
Jianping Zhu, and Mr Purushotham Bangalore. The on-site leader (Bova) serves as 
an effective administrative liaison between CEWES MSRC, NRC and MSU, and as a 
technical liaison between CEWES MSRC users and the entire CFD support team. 
Bova coordinates communication and facilitates interaction with other components
of the CEWES MSRC PET team. This includes maintenance of the CFD Web page 
content and biweekly activity reporting.

The CFD team in the CEWES MSRC PET effort serves the CEWES MSRC by providing:

  * Program-wide CFD support.
  * R&D expertise on selected technology enhancements.
  * HPC assistance for targeted codes.

Program-wide support pertains to direct CEWES MSRC user contact and cultivation,
participation in workshops and technical meetings, user training in HPC, and 
other generic duties. HPC support for targeted codes and delivery of 
collaborative R&D expertise are more specific tasks selected to produce 
technology that has potential application and interest throughout the CEWES MSRC
user community. Year 3 support was structured such that the On-Site Lead assumed
primary responsibility for user contact and interaction. Primary contributions 
of the at-university team were through focused effort collaboration among MSU, 
OSU and CEWES with responsibility of developing a parallel implementation of the
CH3D-SED solver.


CSM: Computational Structural Mechanics CTA 
     (TICAM-Texas & ERC-Mississippi State))

The CSM team is led by Dr J. Tinsley Oden and Dr Graham F. Carey (TICAM-Texas) 
as Co-Principal Investigators.  Dr David Littlefield (IAT-Texas) is a major 
research contributor and works closely with the CTH Application group 
(G. Hertel, D. Crawford) at Sandia.  Dr Abani Patra (University of Buffalo) and 
Dr Atanas Pehlivanov (Texas) have been conducting studies related to EPIC. 
Dr Robert McLay (Texas) is working with David Littlefield on the design of a 
software testbed to evaluate indicators and algorithms for incorporation in CTH.
Oden and Carey are carrying out research (with the team members) on error 
indicators and adaptive strategies to support the effort.  On-site support at
CEWES MSRC, including concentration on user contacts, is provided by Dr Rick 
Weed of the ERC at Mississippi State, working in close contact with the Texas 
group.


CWO: Climate/Weather/Ocean Modeling CTA 
     (Ohio State)

The CWO CEWES MSRC support team consists of the PET On-Site Lead (Dr Steve 
Wornam), two academic co-leads (Dr P. Sadayappan and Dr Keith Bedford), a 
research scientist (Dr David Welsh) and a graduate research associate. We have 
an open vacancy at the research scientist level with a preliminary search 
underway. We have an informal advisory group of CEWES scientists lead by Bob 
Jensen, with additional contributions from Joe Gailani and Billy Johnson, and 
less frequent contacts with J. McKee-Smith and Jeff Holland. The functions of 
the CEWES group are to review the contributions the OSU team makes, develop 
goals and strategies for future work, and advise on content for workshops and 
training classes. The union of the OSU and CWO CEWES scientists is considered to
be the complete CWO team.

The OSU team is responsible for implementing the goals of the annual CEWES
MSRC PET CWO projects, and the team internally pursued these goals in the
following way during Year 3. Project supervision, reporting, and proposal 
preparation were the provence of Sadayappan and Bedford. The training 
portion of our work was the primary responsibility of Welsh and the other 
research scientist (Dr Shuxia Zhang held this position until 9/98), with 
on-site instruction assistance from Bedford and Sadayappan. The core 
support code enhancements to WAM, SWAN and FBM were the responsibility of  
Welsh and Wornom, while the focused effort on coupling was implemented by 
Zhang and Welsh, the graduate student, and Sadayappan and Bedford. The 
focused effort on CH3D-SED was handled by Zhang and the graduate student. 
Daily to weekly staff meetings (including conference calls with Wornom) were 
the primary means of internal coordination and communication.

CWO interactions were handled in the following way. For the major portion of
Year 3, Welsh served as the virtual PET on-site staff and made frequent trips to
CEWES MSRC to coordinate with CEWES MSRC staff. These meetings also included 
Sadayappan and Bedford when leveraging of their trips to CEWES MSRC was 
possible. At the end of January 1999, this virtual staff approach was terminated
when Wornom became the CWO On-Site Lead. With regard to other forms of
communication, all the OSU staff assisted with e-mail and telephone contact with
CEWES MSRC personnel and the other on-site staff, and in the preparation of the 
biweekly Web reports, annual reports, and PET Technical Reports.


EQM: Environmental Quality Modeling CTA 
     (TICAM - Texas)

The CEWES MSRC PET EQM team for Year 3 consisted of Dr Mary F. Wheeler, Dr Clint
Dawson, Dr Victor Parr, Dr Jichun Li, Dr Robert Fithen, Robert Kirby, Dr Monica 
Martinez and Steve Cutchin.  Wheeler is the project leader.  Dawson, Li, 
Martinez, Kirby and Cutchin worked on various aspects of the project at The 
University of Texas at Austin.  Fithen was the EQM On-Site Lead from June
of 1998 until he left in August of 1998 to take a faculty position.  He has
been replaced by Dr Phu Luong. Parr served as EQM user liason and was in 
frequent contact with both the Texas personnel and with EQM personnel at CEWES.



FMC: Forces Modeling and Simulation/C4I CTA 
     (NPAC - Syracuse)

The CEWES MSRC PET FMS support team is based at the Northeast Parallel
Architectures Center (NPAC) at Syracuse University.  Within NPAC, FMS
activities are centered around the Interactive Web Technologies (IWT)
group lead by Dr Wojtek Furmanski.  The group includes two research
scientists and roughly a dozen graduate research assistants who make
various contributions to the FMS activities.


C/C: Collaboration and Communications 
     (NPAC - Syracuse)

The Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC) at Syracuse University 
provides most of the team that supports the Collaboration and Communications 
(C/C) technical infrastructure area.  The Syracuse team is lead by NPAC's 
Director, Dr Geoffrey C. Fox, and draws as necessary on the wide range of 
C/C-related capabilities represented by NPAC's research staff and  students.  
Principal contributions to the suport effort during Year 3 came from Dr David 
Bernholdt, the Tango Interactive Collaboratory Group headed by Dr Marek 
Podgorny, and Yuping Zhu, drawing on her background in Web-linked databases and
intranets. Day-to-day C/C operations, such as the PET Web site and the Tango 
Interactive server are handled by NRC on-site staff members Herman Moore and 
John Eberle, respectively.  


SPPT: Scalable Parallel Programming Tools 
      (CRPC - Rice/Tennessee)

The CEWES MSRC PET SPP Tools support team is based at the Center for Research on
Parallel Computation (CRPC), an NSF-funded Science and Technology Center with
headquarters at Rice University.  Rice plays the lead role in SPP Tools at CEWES
MSRC as well.  The University of Tennessee at Knoxville is also a key CRPC site,
and has a major role in SPP Tools at CEWES MSRC.  The goal of the CRPC is "to 
make parallel computing truly usable by scientists and engineers".  Toward this 
end, CRPC researchers have assessed the software and algorithmic problems posed 
by parallel and distributed machines.  The solutions they have found are crucialelements in the PET support effort in the DOD HPC Modernization Program. 

Individually, the SPP Tools support team includes internationally-recognized 
experts in the areas of distributed and parallel computing, dense and sparse 
linear algebra, parallel languages and compilers, parallel benchmarking and 
performance evaluation, and inter-processor and network communication.  Team 
members have experience in producing, deploying, and supporting software systems
that turn their research ideas into widely used tools, such the Parallel Virtual
Machine (PVM) system and the ScaLAPACK parallel linear algebra library.  In 
addition, team members have led a number of significant standards efforts, 
including the High Performance Fortran (HPF) Forum, Message Passing Interface 
(MPI) Forum, the BLAS Technical Forum, and ParkBench.  They have also been 
instrumental in transferring technologies, including compiler data dependence 
analysis and memory hierarchy optimization techniques, to the commercial sector.
 
Key personnel involved in the CEWES MSRC PET SPPT effort are Dr Ken Kennedy 
(Senior Technical Lead, Rice University), Dr Jack Dongarra (Senior Technical 
Lead, Tennessee), Dr Dick Hanson (SPP Tools Lead, Rice University, starting 
1-1-99), Dr Shirley Browne (SPP Tools Lead, Tennessee), Dr Clay Breshears 
(On-Site SPP Tools Lead, Rice), and Dr Ehtesham Hayder (Rice).  Dr Chuck Koelbel
(Rice) was in the SPPT Tools Lead until leaving on August 31, 1998, for NSF. 

The SPPT Team members use informal electronic means (e-mail and telephone) to 
communicate at a distance.  Typically other contacts are driven by specific 
projects or focused efforts.  For example, a CEWES MSRC user will request a new 
tool through his on-site CTA lead, which will involve the SPP Tools team by 
contacting Breshears.  Breshears will relay the request to one of the 
universities for advice, contacting the team member with the most experience in 
the narrow area.  Usually, a pointer to useful software will be forthcoming in 
short order.  The team does not follow a strict command structure, but finds 
that cooperating in this way is very effective.  They also meet a few times a 
year at conferences such as the DOD HPCMP Users Group Meeting to exchange 
ideas and related experiences.

The Tennessee SPPT team is drawn from researchers and graduate 
students who make make up the Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL), a research 
group of over forty people under the direction of Distinguished Professor
Jack Dongarra.  ICL has internationally recognized expertise in the areas of 
parallel linear algebra and high performance math software, parallel and 
distributed inter-process communication, and performance evaluation and 
optimization. ICL has produced the widely used high-quality LAPACK and 
ScaLAPACK linear algebra libraries, as well as the PVM and NetSolve parallel 
computing systems.  Several of the ICL research staff spend a significant 
portion of their time working on CEWES MSRC PET projects and core support 
activities. In addition, any of the ICL staff are available for short-term 
consulting as needed.


SV: Scientific Visualization
    (NCSA - Illinois & ERC-Mississippi State))

The PET Scientific Visualization (SV) team for the CEWES MSRC is led  by the 
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of 
Illinois, with additional support from the ERC at Mississippi State University. Dr Polly Baker (NCSA) serves as Senior Academic Lead, providing long-term 
direction and leadership for the effort. Dr Alan Shih (NCSA) serves as NCSA 
project lead.  Dr Shih is headquartered at NCSA but spent a significant amount 
of his time at the CEWES MSRC during Year 3. Dr Robert Moorhead (MSU) and Dr 
Raghu Machiraju (MSU) also served as project leads during Year 3.  Dr Richard 
Strelitz (NRC-SAIC) serves as primary liason between the CEWES MSRC and the 
academic personnel.  

The team also included project developers at NCSA, including Randy Heiland,
Dave Bock, and Rob Stein. Project developers from MSU included Mike Chupa, Kelly
McCarter, and Cass Everitt (working with Dr Moorhead) and Bala Nakshatrala 
(working with Dr Raghu Machiraju).

The PET SV team interacts with CEWES MSRC users to define user needs, provide
information on available solutions, and prototype custom solutions where
necessary.  The team also coordinates with other CEWES MSRC personnel
specializing in visualization.