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August 8, 2007
The University of Tennessee is expected to get one of the world’s most powerful computers as part of a $65 million project funded by the National Science Foundation.
Congressman Zach Wamp said, "This is another tremendous win for UT and for the partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Tennessee will now have not one, but two of the world's most powerful computers.
"Our state is rapidly becoming the world's center for high-performance computing."
Officials said the NSF is in the final stages of reviewing the gift for an effort that teams UT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The supercomputer would be housed at ORNL's Joint Institute for Computational Sciences.
The National Science Board tentatively approved the funding at a meeting Wednesday.
An even larger gift - $208 million - was approved for a supercomputing project at the University of Illinois.
The five-year UT project will also include partners at the Texas Advanced Computing Center and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Under the direction of Dr. Thomas Zacharia, the group will acquire and provide to the research community a system with a peak performance of just under one petaflop that is almost four times the capacity of the current NSF-supported Teragrid, officials said.
The TeraGrid is the world's largest, most powerful and comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research. It currently supports more than 1,000 projects and over 4,000 researchers geographically spanning the entire United States.
The system, to be allocated under normal TeraGrid policy, will permit researchers to use high-resolution, multiscale/multiphysics simulations for such tasks as studying the properties of proteins at the atomic scale; understanding the complexities of the brain; determining the fundamental properties of elementary particles; modeling natural disasters, and understanding the delicate balance of processes that are responsible for the global climate and its variation over time.
The project includes several activities in education and outreach including efforts aimed at broadening the participation of women and minorities in science and engineering.
This award to the University of Tennessee is the second Track 2 system NSF has awarded. Last year, the Foundation made a five-year, $59 million Track 2 award to the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin and its partners at Arizona State University and Cornell University. NSF's Track 2 initiative is a four-year activity designed to fund the deployment and operation of up to four leading-edge computing systems that will greatly increase the availability of computing resources to U.S. researchers.
To facilitate the use of these increasingly complicated tools by a broad range of researchers, the Track 2 systems will be integrated into a national, distributed cyberinfrastructure known as the TeraGrid. The TeraGrid brings together resources for computation, data analysis and visualization, data management and storage with extensive technical help and consulting resources, on-line and in-person training opportunities, collaboration tools, and web-based entry-points. These simplify the use of advanced digital technology for research, lowering the barrier to their use and greatly increasing their availability, it was stated.
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