National Center for Computational Sciences

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee took another quantum leap in the computing universe Wednesday with a decision by the National Science Board to underwrite a second world-class supercomputer in Tennessee.

The board authorized the National Science Foundation to award $65 million over five years to build a supercomputer capable of nearly 1,000 teraflops — or 1,000 trillion calculations a second _ at UT’s Joint Institute for Computational Science.

The institute is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a Department of Energy facility managed by UT and Battelle Memorial Institute.

The announcement means that the Oak Ridge lab, which currently hosts the second-fastest supercomputer in the world, could have the world’s two fastest machines by 2009.

“This is another tremendous win for UT and for the partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory,” said U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn. “Our state is rapidly becoming the world’s center for high-performance computing.”

For scientists studying global climate change, the design of new materials and the reactions occurring in living cells, the new supercomputing goal is 1 petaflop — or 1,000 trillion arithmetic calculations per second.

Source: Tennessean.com