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).
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