Campus in Brief (1/23/06)

Pitt faculty, staff and retirees raise half a million

Lisa Cunningham, Staff Writer… Pitt faculty, staff and retirees raise half a million

Lisa Cunningham, Staff Writer

As more pledges still filter in, Pitt faculty, staff and retirees have already exceeded their goal of collecting half a million dollars for the United Way Campaign.

Pitt has raised $502,963 for its annual campaign.

The campaign actively ran from Oct. 12 to Nov. 23. In some of the departments at Pitt, coordinators and representatives sent out e-mails and held fundraisers such as candy sales to encourage involvement.

Anne Franks – Pitt’s United Way Campaign manager and the director of Administrative Services in the Office of Institutional Advancement – attributed the success of the campaign to these people.

“The most success goes to the hard work of representatives of departments who encouraged people to participate,” Franks said.

Three prize drawings were also held to increase participation. Anyone who made a pledge, regardless of its value, was entered into the drawings. The grand prize was airline tickets.

The money is going to the United Way’s Impact Fund, where the money can then be distributed to its various agencies any way it pleases. Although the campaign is no longer being promoted at this time, pledge forms are still being mailed in or completed online.

Supercomputers come of age

Nana Ama Sarfo, Staff Writer

Twenty years ago, Pitt joined the ranks of schools such as Princeton and Cornell when – through a collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University and Westinghouse Electric Company – it opened a supercomputing center, one of five in the country.

Tuesday, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center celebrated its 20th birthday, joining centers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California at San Diego as one of three original remaining supercomputing centers in the country.

Funded through a National Science Foundation grant, the center was the brainchild of two Pitt and CMU physicists who decided to pool their resources and create a new research facility, according to Michael Schneider, a staff writer at the center.

The center keeps its computers on the Westinghouse property in Monroeville, Pa. Its offices are located in the Mellon Building, Schneider added.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, which attracts scientists and engineers from all across the country, devotes itself to all disciplines of science, Schneider said.

The center, which pioneered air-pollution studies in Los Angeles, also created the first three-dimensional model of blood-flow in the heart.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s newest computer system, which is more than 10,000 times more powerful than a personal computer, has been included as a part of the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid, a project aimed at connecting supercomputers throughout the country. The center also regularly collaborates with UPMC.

For students who are interested in becoming involved in research at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the center offers internships.