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March 2, 1995

National information infrastructure in science and education

Love is not the only arena in which opposites might attract and actually work better as a team. By linking together super-computers of differing capabilities around the country, researchers at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center have found that computers actually can draw on each other's strong points and improve their performance.

Ralph Roskies, scientific director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, told the audience at the Founders Day symposium that the high speed networks created by such links allows the tackling of large scale problems that are otherwise unfeasible.

"It is clear to everybody that this network is important because supercomputers are too expensive to have on everybody's desk," he said.

Among the problems being tackled on the supercomputing network by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the Department of Pathology in the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is a digital library of pathology slides.

Creating a digital record of tissue material on glass slides will keep the material from deteriorating or being misplaced, according to Roskies. "What is of interest to the pathologist is the information in those images," Roskies pointed out. "He doesn't actually need the tissue and you can move the information around a lot easier than you can move the tissue." Networking on the super-computers will enable the images to be incorporated into an electronic medical record that can be used for remote diagnostics, for teaching and for regional study.

"This will turn out to be an extremely good teaching tool," Roskies said. "If you look at pathology textbooks, they typically have one or two full color slides on particular organs and diseases because they are very expensive to print. But if you just download these slides you can expose students to many more examples of a particular situation." Another supercomputing project is Common Knowledge Pittsburgh, a joint project of the University, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the Pittsburgh Public Schools.

The object of the project is to study the implications of introducing electronic networks, Internet access and computing, into an urban public school system. According to Roskies, the benefits of such an electronic network would be to reduce the isolation of the traditional classroom and provide a wide range of information to people everywhere within the school system.

One of the most interesting aspects of such networks, Roskies added, is that it changes the relationship of teachers and administrators. It tends to decentralize the environment and restructure the school system.

What sets Common Knowledge Pittsburgh apart from other such school networks around the country, according to Roskies, "is that it gives a great deal of attention to the curricular implications of having access to the network and having computing available in the classrooms." At the moment, Roskies said, there are 11 schools in the Pittsburgh school system connected into the network, but their technologies are different, so the challenge is to integrate everything into one standard network.

–Mike Sajna


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