The goal of the Laboratory for Advanced Scientific Computing and Applications (LASCA) is to provide expertise and leadership in high-end scientific computing research and education at Virginia Tech. Located in the Advanced Computing and Information Technology Center (ACITC), Torgersen Hall, the laboratory is a visible and strategic center of activity in applied high-performance computing on campus. LASCA participants do basic research in high-performance parallel computation and assist scientists and engineers in applying high-end computing resources to their problems. By bringing together experts in scientific computing and its applications, LASCA helps build the kind of multidisciplinary teams needed to address today's most challenging computational science problems.

LASCA affiliates are engaged in four broad categories of activities:

• Accelerating research and development in scientific computation. LASCA participants develop and analyze new algorithms, software, and systems to solve large-scale scientific problems; they work in the traditional and emerging fields of scientific computing: numerical analysis, numerical algorithms, mathematical software, parallel algorithms and systems, tools and environments, data mining, performance evaluation and visualization, and high-speed networking.

• Promoting collaboration among users of high-performance computing. Virginia Tech faculty and students from many scientific disciplines rely on high-end computing and networking resources in order to address otherwise intractable problems. LASCA seeks to foster collaboration among computer scientists and researchers from various application areas. These collaborations are of mutual benefit: computer science researchers make new technology available to the applications areas, while applications researchers supply challenging problems for testing new algorithms and systems.

• Educating students. Graduate and undergraduate students working in LASCA gain valuable experience in a multidisciplinary setting typical of modern computational science and engineering.

• A portal to world-class high-performance computing resources and research. LASCA provides computational science and high-performance computing expertise for users of Virginia Tech's Terascale Computing Facility. The laboratory is also a contact point between Virginia Tech and world-class computing resources and expertise at US government laboratories and high performance computing centers.

LASCA affiliates include faculty and students from two broad groups: those whose primary research interests include high-performance scientific computing, and those whose primary research activities are in another scientific or engineering discipline but who are actively applying high-end computing resources to their problems. Current participants are drawn from seventeen academic departments and ten research centers.

For further information please visit research.cs.vt.edu/lasca.