ORAU, ORNL Partner to Provide University Researchers Access
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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