The San Diego Supercomputer Center is making one of its powerful parallel clusters available to researchers around the country, with a little help from Interactive Supercomputing Inc. With ISC's Star-P interactive supercomputing platform, SDSC is making the cluster easier to use and available on demand to scientists, engineers, students and others across the country. Star-P bypasses the notoriously complex programming requirements of parallel systems to let researchers transparently work with the cluster using familiar desktop tools. Users can code models and algorithms on their desktop computers using popular applications such as MATLAB, Python and R, but run them instantly and interactively from a distance over the internet on SDSC's cluster. Researchers at the University of Maryland, for example, are using the system to do 4-D MRI medical image processing to improve radiation therapies.... read more