ACADEMIA

A new high-powered supercomputing facility at the University of North Texas will provide a 10-fold increase in the university's computational power and will be among the premier facilities of its kind in the country.

Once built, the new $2.2 million centralized high-performance computing facility will provide scientists and researchers with the tools they need to perform invaluable research in fields ranging from aeronautics to carbon sequestration.

"This is a huge step forward for the university," said Vish Prasad, vice president for research and economic development. "This facility will position UNT to compete for the biggest and most competitive grants. Only a handful of universities nationwide have this sort of computational power."

The HPC facility is being purchased mostly with state incentive funds for UNT's success with the Closing the Gaps initiative and some internal funds. It will be installed this summer and should be operational during the fall semester, said Maurice Leatherbury, associate vice president for computing and chief technology officer. 

UNT purchased the high-performance computing facility from Dell.

The new facility will not only support the endeavors of current faculty, but also serve as a recruitment tool as UNT hires recognized experts in fields ranging from plant science to nanotechnology as part of the $25 million commitment it made last year to collaborative research.

"I can't even begin to describe how exciting this is," said Angela Wilson, associate professor of chemistry who served on a committee that evaluated computing needs on campus. "UNT will become an even bigger player in the university research scene. This opens up so many doors for our faculty and researchers."

Work across campus will benefit from the upgrade.

• Researchers in UNT's Institute for Science and Engineering Simulation (ISES) use computers to model what causes jet engine failure and to evaluate materials at the molecular level to design more robust airplane parts for the U.S. Air Force.
• Researchers in the Center for Computational Epidemiology and Response Analysis use computers to predict how infectious diseases, such as influenza and Tuberculosis, spread across a given population on a given day.
• Faculty in the Center for Advanced Scientific and Computational Modeling (CASCaM) simulate what happens when carbon dioxide is injected underground to determine if storing greenhouse gases in the Earth is a safe and viable solution to fight global warming.
• Faculty in the Texas Center for Digital Knowledge rely on computational power to enhance the creation, storage, organization, retrieval, use and evaluation of information in a variety of digital formats from social media to historical newspapers.

Before UNT acquired the new facility, researchers occasionally relied on national computing centers to run lengthy calculations, said Wilson, who is also a co-director of CASCaM. Those centers were so backed up that it took weeks or even months to get answers.

UNT researchers will now be able to run hundreds of calculations at once at great speed.

To put the upgrade in perspective, UNT's current scientific computing facility consists of 50 nodes and 200 processor cores. The combined processing power represents about two teraFLOPS.

FLOPS is a measurement of a computer's performance, especially in scientific calculations that rely heavily on floating point calculations. A teraFLOP is a trillion floating point operations per second.

The new cluster will have 224 nodes, with 1,792 of Intel's latest processor cores. That will produce at least 20 teraFLOPS.

"High-performance computing capabilities are essential for us to make sense of enormous sets of data," said William Moen, associate professor of library and information sciences and director of research for the College of Information. "A university-wide investment is vital to UNT achieving the level of research we all want."