University of Tennessee gets $18 Million to Link Computers Across U.S.
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has received $18 million funding to assist in creating linkages between high-performance computers and research facilities throughout the United States. The linkage will become a powerful tool for taking on some of the most complex problems in science.
The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) will carry out the project, which is part of a $121 million National Science Foundation program to improve connections between high-performance computers, data sources, and experimental facilities. NICS is an NSF center housed in the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences which is jointly operated by UT Knoxville and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
"The University of Tennessee is committed to scientific discovery and innovation," said Chancellor Jimmy G. Cheek. "We are proud to continue to support the thousands of scientists that use this grid as they seek to make this world a better place to live through their research."
The new five-year program, called Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, or XSEDE, will replace the TeraGrid linkage that now connects the country's supercomputing resources. NICS is partnering with the University of Illinois, the lead institution on XSEDE.
"The XSEDE grid will allow scientists and engineers to create scientific workflows and gateways, analyze data, and model complex phenomena," said Patricia Kovatch, director of operations for XSEDE and project director of NICS.
The supercomputers in the XSEDE grid will continue to help solve the world's toughest dilemmas such as climate change, fatal diseases, and the energy crisis through climate modeling, drug design, or DNA sequencing, and various types of simulation.
Other institutions participating in the five year project include Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Shodor Education Foundation, the Southeastern Universities Research Association, Julich Supercomputing Centre, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Carnegie Mellon University, Rice University, Indiana University, and the universities of Pittsburgh, Texas at Austin, Virginia, Chicago, Purdue, Cornell, Ohio State, and California at San Diego.
Source: University of Tennessee
Published July 27, 2011, 7:36 p.m.
Subscribe to Knoxville Daily Sun
