Supercomputer to link 3 Arkansas campuses
Posted on Thursday, September 13, 2007
The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville is getting its second supercomputer with the help of an $ 803, 306 grant from the National Science Foundation.
The new computer will give the university greater capacity to store data, do complex computations and connect with other networks at universities nationwide.
“In scope and scale, this project really extends far beyond the Fayetteville campus,” Amy Apon, professor of computer science and engineering and UA director of high-performance computing, said in a statement Wednesday.
The new computer will link UA with computer networks at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, allowing researchers at all three campuses to share resources and technology.
It will also link UA to the Great Plains Network, a consortium of 22 universities in six Midwestern states, and the Southern Universities Research Association’s computer grid, which encompasses 31 universities in about 15 states.
The computer will also connect with the Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network, a $ 6. 4 million system funded under Gov. Mike Huckabee in 2005 that links Arkansas to national and international research networks.
In Fayetteville, the new computer will be connected with UA’s first supercomputer Red Diamond, which was purchased in 2005.
Red Diamond has helped campus researchers campus solve complex problems, such as calculating molecular formulas for new drugs and predicting the behavior of tornados and volcanoes, according to a UA news release.
The new computer will be about four times faster than Red Diamond, operating at a speed of six teraflops, or six trillion computing operations per second.
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