News
Publication: Knoxville News Sentinel; Date: Aug 8, 2007
UT gets $65M supercomputer grant; may be largest award ever
By Frank Munger
The University of Tennessee will receive one of the world’s most powerful computers as part of a five-year, $65 million project to be funded by the National Science Foundation.
The NSF still must do additional due-diligence reviews before the award is final — a process that’s expected to take about a month — but if approved it would be the largest research grant in UT history.
“We believe that’s the case,” Hank Dye, UT’s vice president for public relations, said Wednesday. “It’s a big day … If this is finalized, it puts us among the nation’s elite in supercomputing.”
UT teamed with Oak Ridge National Laboratory on the NSF proposal, and the supercomputer — capable of nearly 1,000 trillion calculations per second — would be housed in the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, a state-funded facility at ORNL.
Thomas Zacharia, an associate lab director at ORNL who holds a professorship at UT, is the project’s leader.
Dye confirmed that the university was notified that funding for the work had been authorized.
According to information released on the NSF web site, the National Science Board approved a resolution Wednesday authorizing the UT-ORNL project, as well as an even bigger computing project at the University of Illinois.
The Illinois supercomputing project will receive $208 million over 4.5 years to build a petascale computer, with sustained operations of more than 1,000 trillion calculations per second.
According to the NSF, the “Track 2” system awarded to UT would be a smaller but extremely powerful system that’s expected to “bridge the gap between current high-performance computers and even more advanced petascale systems under development.”
ORNL is also working on a separate Department of Energy project to develop a petascale computer as part of the lab’s ongoing partnership with the Cray supercomputing company.
© 2007, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.