ACADEMIA

New Mexico State University says it plans to purchase a new supercomputer to assist researchers and help the university become a leading center in the field of information sciences. The supercomputer, which will be paid for with a $240,000 grant from the National Science Foundation as well as $40,000 from NMSU, will, at first, be used on four separate research projects, but later will be made more broadly available to researchers on the Las Cruces campus. NMSU is in the process of establishing some key areas that will serve as the basis of four new centers of research. Those future centers of research include information sciences, space technology, water issues and uses, and border control. Ellen Davis, a spokeswoman for NMSU, says the new supercomputer, which will be housed at the university's computing center, will help in advancing each center, but particularly information sciences. Jeanine Cook, assistant professor in the Klipsch School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was the principal investigator on the project to get the supercomputer to NMSU -- a move Cook says is long overdue for the university. "We have nothing," she says, while noting that many researchers previously used supercomputers at one of the state's two national laboratories in Albuquerque and Los Alamos, to conduct work requiring complex modeling. The NSF grant was a collaborative effort undertaken by Cook's school and NMSU's departments of mechanical engineering and physics. University officials say they do not know what type of supercomputer will be purchased, but they expect it to be on campus by early 2005. The four initial projects will use the supercomputer for a variety of research topics, including wildfire modeling for the U.S. Forest Service, the absorption of heavy metals by plants, the study of electrical signals emitted by the brain and heart, and the development of more accurate models used in developing the next generation of microprocessors. Cook says it could be between one and five years before the new supercomputer is available to researchers outside of the grant proposal team.