News
Publication: Knoxville News Sentinel; Date: Aug 9, 2007
UT in line to be among elite in supercomputing
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 could 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 Wednesday on the NSF Web site, the National Science Board approved a resolution for 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 4½ years to build a petascale computer, with sustained operations of more than 1,000 trillion calculations per second.
The “Track 2” system awarded to UT would be a smaller system that’s expected to “bridge the gap between current high-performance computers and even more advanced petascale systems under development,” the NSF said.
In addition to UT and ORNL, other team members on the NSF project are the Texas Advanced Computer Center and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
According to the NSF, “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.”
Teragrid is a powerful “cyberinfrastructure” that is available for open scientific research, supporting the work of thousands of researchers in the United States.
ORNL also is 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.
The NSF announcement drew some criticism from scientists who suggested that the UT proposal was a front to put more money at ORNL, a DOE facility already well funded.
“There’s no validity to that,” Dye said. “Those people just don’t have an understanding of the partnerships we have with Oak Ridge.”
Senior writer Frank Munger may be reached at 865-342-6329.
© 2007, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.