In 2005, Sigal Gottlieb was a young UMass Dartmouth mathematics professor in need of high-performance computer resources to pursue her research. At that time, federal agencies still operated most super computers, and academic researchers rented computer time, often a frustrating arrangement—it could take two weeks to run a one-hour job. emand for processing power was also increasing rapidly, as computer simulation, or modeling, became the approach of choice for more and more scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. “We began to think about getting our own machine,” Gottlieb recalls. She went online in search of kindred spirits among her UMassD colleagues, found several other computationally-deprived faculty across a range of disciplines, and contacted them regarding collaboration. Gottlieb wrote a research proposal around the collaboration idea, with acquisition of a supercomputer as the unifying theme. The proposal wasn’t successful, but a flame had been lit, one that wouldn’t be extinguished. A truly multidisciplinary scientific computing group had been formed.
extremely powerful gaming console that was selling for a very reasonable cost. “One PlayStation is equivalent to 25 PCs in terms of computing power,” says Khanna. “So my wife bought me one for testing, and it was promising.” The prospects of getting funding from the University or federal sources to buy Playstations looked bleak, so Khanna contacted Sony, who responded with a donation of four PlayStations. He bought three more, for a total of eight, enough (he calculated) to free him from supercomputer rental costs. Khanna wasn’t the only one to see the computing potential of PlayStations. The U.S. Air Force Research Lab was building a 300-PS machine of their own—in their case to test urban surveillance applications—and in 2010, they gave Khanna access.
It’s more than play
The informal scientific computing group continued to grow in size and activities including a seminar series on topics of mutual interest, brown bag lunches for discussion of shared research challenges, and a research retreat for participants.
Meanwhile, Gottlieb’s colleague in the Physics Department, Professor Gaurav Khanna, was taking a different route in pursuit of computational resources. In 2006, Sony introduced the new PlayStation 3, an
Dr. Sigal Gottlieb, center, works with doctoral-level mathematics students at the Center for Computing Science and Visualization Research; (l-r) Leah Isherwood, Zack Grant, Gottlieb, Sidafa Conde, Jiahua Jiang.
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