New computer software enables rapid response to time-critical emergencies

The U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago researchers demonstrated a new specialized software system at Supercomputing 2006 that provides computational resources quickly for emergency applications affecting public health, safety, and security. This new system, called SPRUCE (Special PRiority and Urgent Computing Environment), supports urgent computing on both traditional supercomputers and distributed computational Grids.