Ralph Z. Roskies
Ph.D., 1966, Princeton University

Area of Research:  Computational Physics and Particle Physics

Roskies is Professor of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh and a founder and Co-Scientific Director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC). He is the author of over 60 papers in theoretical elementary particle physics.  In 1984, together with Professor Michael Levine of Carnegie Mellon University and James Kasdorf from Westinghouse, he developed the proposal to the National Science Foundation for what became the PSC. As Scientific Director, Roskies oversees operations, plans its future course, and concerns himself with its scientific impact. The PSC has been a national leader in providing the highest capability computing to the US national research community. It has pioneered developments in file systems, heterogeneous computing, parallel algorithms and scientific visualization. It currently fields the Terascale Computing System, the world's most powerful academically-based computing facility dedicated to open scientific research. Roskies' pivotal role in developing and implementing the NSF allocation process has given him a very broad overview of leading computational science and close ties to its most prominent practitioners. He has served as advisor to and as reviewer of a large number of U.S. and international supercomputing centers.
 


The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC, www.psc.edu), co-directed by Physics Professor Ralph Roskies, is a multi-agency national supercomputing center, which is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, and Westinghouse Electric Company. It is a leader in providing the national research community leading edge computational resources for scientific investigation.

With NSF funding, it is currently assembling the world's most powerful supercomputer dedicated to open scientific research (peak speed of 6 Teraflops, built from 3000 Compaq Alpha processors, with 3 Terabytes of memory, and about 55 Terabytes of disk, utilizing the Quadrics Interconnect, which is characterized by high interprocessor bandwidth and low latency). PSC also operates a massively parallel Cray T3E supercomputer (544 DEC Alpha processors, peak speed of 460 Gflops).

Besides computational speed, PSC resources include advanced visualization capabilities and large-scale data storage facilities. The Center has an NIH-funded concentration on biomedical supercomputing. PSC offers training in supercomputing techniques at introductory and advanced levels. Class access to PSC machines for educational purposes is easily obtained.

Researchers with little or no supercomputing experience can request a starter grant for up to ten thousand processor hours of computing. Proposals for larger, established research projects are selected through a peer-review process, with consideration given to the quality of the research and the need for supercomputing.

Recent Publications:

"Metacomputing: Pipe dream or practical reality?," Computers in Physics 8, No. 5, 540-545, September/October (1994)

"Loop Representations of the Quark Determinant in Lattice QCD," R. Roskies, A. Duncan, E. Eichten, H. Thacker, Phys. Rev. D60, 54505, (1999).

"Analytic Evaluation of Sixth Order Contribution to the Electron's g Factor," R. Roskies, M. J. Levine & E. Remiddi, Quantum Electrodynamics ed. T. Kinoshita, World Scientific, (1990).

"Relevant Operators in Exactly Solvable Lattice Hamiltonians," R. Roskies, A. Duncan, Phys. Rev. D40, 1268, (1989).

"Lanczos Calculation of the Spectrum of Hamiltonian Lattice Gauge Theory," R. Roskies, J. W. Choe, A. Duncan, Phys. Rev. D37, 472, (1988).

"High temperature expansions to fifteenth order," R. Roskies, P. D. Sackett, Journal of Statistical Physics 49, 447, (1987).