Mississippi, university move up the list for supercomputing power

Mississippi has earned a national ranking for something that usually is associated with more urban settings.

The state now ranks third-behind New Mexico and California-for supercomputing. The statistics recently were published in the 11th edition of "TOP500," a list of the world's most powerful supercomputer sites compiled twice yearly by researchers at the universities of Mannheim (Germany) and Tennessee.

Mississippi State is on the list for the first time, ranking 20th in the nation and fourth in the Southeast for supercomputing power. No other Mississippi university is mentioned in the listing, which includes supercomputers used by research institutions, government agencies, and industry.

"Mississippi provides 41 percent of the high performance computing power for the Defense Department, with two of its four Shared Resource Centers located in the state," said Joe Thompson of MSU's National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center.

He said the recent addition of a supercomputer to the ERC inventory helped put MSU on the TOP500 list for the first time.

A professor of aerospace engineering, Thompson is a member of President Clinton's Advisory Committee for High Performance Computing and Communications, Information Technology, and the Next Generation Internet.

ERC director Don Trotter, Thompson's colleague in helping make Mississippi State an international leader in supercomputing research, said installation of the new 32-processor SUN Ultra HPC 10000 unit "brought MSU onto the list at No. 326 among supercomputing sites in the world."

Trotter is a professor of electrical and computer engineering. Both he and Thompson are MSU graduates.