An Introduction to the Supercomputing Institute and Parallel Programming

                      H. Birali Runesha, Ph.D
               Scientific Computing/User Support Group Leader
              University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute


The University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute is an  
interdisciplinary research program available to all University of 
Minnesota faculty and their research groups.  As part of the University's 
Digital Technology Center, the Institute is housed in the newly remodeled 
Walter Library on the East Bank of the Twin Cities campus.  The mission of 
the Institute is to provide supercomputing resources and user support to 
faculty and students in all of the colleges of the Univeristy. 

In this presentation we will give an overview of the Supercomputing 
Institute as part of the Digital Technology Center at the University of  
Minnesota.  We will also present the many Institute supported programs  
available to researchers, including the hardware, software, and user  
support resources. 

Additionally, we will discuss the parallel programming paradigms with 
respect to the current hardware available at the Institute and some of the  
current computational challenges in the areas of geophysics, engineering,  
computatinal chemistry, and bio-informatics.