The University of Tennessee celebrated Thursday a grant that will bring one of the fastest supercomputers to East Tennessee, thereby increasing the Innovation Valley's competitiveness in the global information marketplace.
The $65 million grant from the National Science Foundation will be used to build and operate a computer capable of 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or one petaflop.
The computer will be housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and was granted in large part due to the collaboration of the university, ORNL and other local agencies.
According to the University of Tennessee website, UT President John Petersen said, "This is a major national win that places the university in the upper echelon of supercomputing capability. It represents further affirmation of the tremendous capability of the University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge partnership. It will have far-reaching positive impact on economic development for the entire state."
The building and operation of the supercomputer will attract at least 50 new jobs to the area, according to information from the University of Tennessee.
The supercomputer will be developed and delivered in stages, with the first stage to be completed this year, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel reports from the company building the computer.
Some likely operations for the computer will be in the fields of astrophysics (producing galaxy transformation simulations), climate science (predicting extreme weather and modeling climate change), and material science (developing new, useful materials).
Note: This release was sent from ORAU, a Knoxville Chamber member.
As Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) reaches petascale computing on the order of 1,000 trillion calculations per second over the coming year, Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) is positioning its university partners to take full advantage of these ultrascale computing resources for scientific discovery.
During the recent annual meeting of its Council of Sponsoring Institutions, ORAU announced that it would partner with ORNL to provide funding for a competitive, high-performance computing grants program for faculty and student teams.* The grants for each team would be $75,000 for three years ($25,000 for the first year with options to renew for two additional years at a combined total of $75,000), with two grants awarded per year.
In turn, ORNL would provide university researchers with access to its computing facilities and staff, and potentially some additional discretionary resources, in order to galvanize a partnership for successful and mutually beneficial scientific research to be performed.
The program presents an opportunity to create some institutional strategic alignment with ORNL in the scientific areas that require computational support.
“ORAU makes investments in faculty and student programs, and we align these investments with the science agenda at ORNL,” said ORAU President Ron Townsend. “Over the past several years, ORNL and Thomas Zacharia have built an impressive computational capability here at Oak Ridge, and it is our goal to provide opportunities for faculty and staff to become more intimately engaged in that resource.”
Thomas Zacharia, who is associate laboratory director for ORNL’s Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate, noted that having joint collaborations with universities in computing is absolutely critical for advances in science.
“We all become stronger if we can bring the best of what the lab has to offer coupled with the best of what the university community has to offer,” said Zacharia. “And, we have a tremendous partner in ORAU that engages graduate, undergraduate, postdoctoral students and faculty in scientific discovery through advanced computing.”
By the end of 2008, ORNL will deploy the Cray XT5 supercomputer, which is a 1 petaflops leadership-class system for science. And by 2018, the lab expects to have an exaflops system in place, which would be a thousand times faster than the petaflops Cray system. This kind of exponential growth of supercomputing allows the U.S. to sustain a competitive edge and superiority in science and technology. ORNL’s supercomputing capabilities will make scientific discovery possible for university faculty and students in the areas of superconductivity, computational biology, climate, combustion, astrophysics, and fusion, to name a few.
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