The Laboratory for Parallel Computational Mechanics is a small research facility in the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics at the Pennsylvania State University. The lab itself is located in room 408 of the newly constructed Earth and Engineering Sciences Building on the West Campus of University Park. Room 306 houses the "MATRIX", our cluster of Apple Macintosh G3s and G4s.

The research and background of the LPCM is diverse, covering many areas of engineering from materials to spacecraft, however the common thread among us is a foundation in mechanics and a need for powerful computational resources to solve those engineering problems. The macintosh platform combined with a fast ethernet and MPI, or mesage passing interface, facilitates those computational needs. With the newly released Mac OS X, the macintosh platform also provides a UNIX foundation with the ease of use of a Mac.