A “people person” with a background in helping users take advantage of high-performance computing resources and whose job already focuses on assisting researchers in using the TeraGrid. You couldn’t ask for a better description of a good TeraGrid Campus Champion.

That’s just what Purdue has in Kim Dillman, a research programmer for the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing — the research-computing arm of ITaP, Purdue's central information technology organization.

Dillman recently was named the University’s first Campus Champion.

“She has a lot of experience and is very user-focused,” said Carol Song, a Rosen Center senior research scientist and principal investigator for the TeraGrid at Purdue.

The TeraGrid Campus Champions program is designed to grow and diversify the user base of the TeraGrid — the National Science Foundation’s world’s-largest, most comprehensive high-end computing cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research, education and innovation — by recruiting local evangelists on campuses around the country. Purdue is a TeraGrid partner and resource provider.

Spearheaded by Kay Hunt, customer service manager of the Rosen Center, the champions program has enlisted more than 30 of the user advocates at schools spread from South Carolina to Hawaii and Alaska to Louisiana since it began in March 2008. Purdue wasn’t one of those campuses until now, however — a situation Hunt wanted to remedy.

Enter Dillman, who came to Purdue from industry in December to join the TeraGrid user support staff at the Rosen Center. She came from Delphi Corporation, where she worked for nearly 30 years as an engineer, in research and development and as a technology solutions architect, among other things.

“She brings with her many years of experience in industry supporting high-performance computing users,” Song said. “She always has a good understanding of what the user’s problem is, and if it needs more research, she’ll do it. She articulates well. She’ll explain in ways the users can understand.”

For ITaP, Dillman supports TeraGrid users around the country and other researchers using high-performance and high-throughput computing resources operated by the Rosen Center, such as Purdue’s Steele supercomputing cluster and the Purdue Condor pool — a distributed computing system harnessing more than 20,000 processors in networked computers on and off campus for mammoth compute jobs.

Researchers nationwide can tap Steele and the Condor pool through the TeraGrid, not to mention some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world at TeraGrid partner sites. The TeraGrid also makes available a large variety of software packages and science gateways designed to make complicated tools easier to use through Web interfaces. All of it is generally available at no cost to individual researchers.

In her new, additional role as Purdue’s Campus Champion, Dillman sees her mission as getting more Purdue researchers to take advantage of this cyber horn of plenty by serving as a one-stop shop for the TeraGrid at Purdue.

“The users I used to support at my company would love to have access to these resources,” she said.

As a Campus Champion, Dillman can help Purdue researchers quickly get a TeraGrid account and time on TeraGrid resources, assist them in getting their applications and jobs running, aid in troubleshooting and more. But Dillman also can lend a hand at an even earlier juncture — as early as deciding whether resources available through the TeraGrid might benefit a research project.

“My big thing is, I need people to contact me, even if they’re not sure,” Dillman said. “Just call me, e-mail me, get in touch with me and say, ‘I think maybe I might have an interest.’ All they have to do is contact me. I’ll come over to their office and sit down.”

That offer doesn’t just apply to research projects, Dillman noted. The TeraGrid is rife with education and outreach opportunities as well, for use in both college and K-12 classrooms.

“There isn’t a restriction that it just has to be pure research,” Dillman said.

Dillman can be reached by phone at (765) 494-5446 or email at kadillma@purdue.edu

Through coordinated policy, grid software and high-performance network connections, the TeraGrid integrates a distributed set of high-capability computational, data management and visualization resources to facilitate research. The TeraGrid also broadens scientific communities through its science gateway collaborations and education, outreach and training programs. Currently, TeraGrid resources include more than a petaflop of combined computing capability and more than 30 petabytes of online and archival data storage from eleven resource provider sites across the nation. Coordinated through the Grid Infrastructure Group at the University of Chicago, resource provider sites include: Purdue; Indiana University; the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative; the National Center for Atmospheric Research; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; the National Institute for Computational Sciences; Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center; San Diego Supercomputer Center; Texas Advanced Computing Center; University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Writer: Greg Kline, science and technology writer, ITaP, (765) 494-8167, gkline@purdue.edu

Sources: Kim Dillman, (765) 494-5446, kadillma@purdue.edu
Kay Hunt, (765) 496-8290, kay@purdue.edu
Carol Song, (765) 496-7467, carolxsong@purdue.edu

Photo: Kim Dillman

Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907 USA, (765) 494-4600
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Inquiries or comments: itap@purdue.edu