The Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) announced the creation of a scholarship in memory of Dr. Charlie Bender, the founding chairperson of CASC and executive director of the Ohio Supercomputer Center during 1987-2002. Dr. Bender passed away just weeks before SC07, the annual international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis.
This year’s SC07 conference, held in Reno, features the world’s leading supercomputer centers and vendors giving presentations, technical talks, and demonstrations of tomorrow’s most powerful computing systems. CASC members, long a mainstay of the participants in the SC conference, made up over 35% of the research exhibitors at the conference.
CASC has long been active as an advocate of the importance of advanced computing to research and industrial competitiveness in the US. CASC has been in existence for nearly 20 years, started by a group of people including Dr. Charlie Bender for just this purpose. Dr. Richard Pritchard, the Secretary-Treasurer of CASC and a colleague of Dr. Bender’s for 40 years, said “Charlie was a friend, a colleague, and more than anything a mentor to me and many other people in this community.”
CASC also announced a new high-water mark in membership, having reached 50 members just before the SC07 conference. The leadership position of CASC members is demonstrated in many ways at this conference, including the fact that all current resource providers involved in the NSF-funded TeraGrid are CASC members.
CASC released a new brochure at SC07 describing the many contributions of CASC in advancing scientific computing, networking, the development and implementation of cyberinfrastructure, and the development of a 21st-century workforce for the nation. Dr. Craig Stewart, Chair of CASC and Associate Dean for Research Technologies at Indiana University, said “CASC members are creating the future of US cyberinfrastructure, and I encourage anyone interested in U.S. competitiveness to request a copy of our new brochure by contacting us at casc@casc.org”.
