GOVERNMENT

DENVER, CO -- Sun Microsystems Inc., today announced the selection of the University of Houston as the site for creating the first Campus Grid environment focusing on Geoscience application developments. The project, led by a team from the University of Houston's Computer Science Department, will enhance the Grid environment to improve job submission and execution, and will use the Grid for research in air quality modeling and seismic processing and imaging. Enabling the Campus Grid To accomplish its task, the University of Houston will combine Sun hardware in the form of a large computational cluster, the SolarisTM Operating Environment and SunTM Grid Engine software to aggregate compute power and control and manage the usage of computational resources over several concurrent projects. The deployment of Sun hardware on the campus includes two Sun FireTM 6800 Midframe servers and 13 Sun Fire V880TM servers, totaling 104 CPUs and replaces the IBM SP2. Sun's Grid Engine software will enable the massive amounts of computation required in this effort by exploiting resources that are underutilized at various times throughout the day and night. "This partnership with Sun gives the University of Houston national recognition in computer science and computational sciences," said Chuck Shomper, vice president of Information Technology at the University of Houston. "This grant enables us to provide our researchers with the means to conduct competitive research in a variety of computational disciplines." As a Sun Center of Excellence, the University of Houston will perform interdisciplinary research in air quality modeling and will collaborate with the local petrochemical industry to develop new algorithms for high-resolution imaging of seismic data. The computing and data storage facilities supplied by Sun will enable researchers to enhance and deploy a multiscale Air Quality Model that simulates potentially harmful atmospheric conditions, such as high ozone levels, and enables the evaluation of possible remedies. "Working with the University of Houston's projects, we're combining the top minds in Computing and Geoscience with the industry's best technology for processing and analyzing vast amounts of data and we are confident that these projects will see great success," said Joerg Schwarz, Group Manager of Scientific and Engineering Computing at Sun. "Sun is focused on advancing Grid Computing technology to help transform critical university research into future products and competitive advantages that will affect not only academia, but also the commercial realm, as well as human lives." "Campus-wide Grids, such as the one Sun has helped us build, will allow researchers to take advantage of underutilized system resources, no matter where they reside on the campus. This grid will enable us to accomplish our research and application development goals," explained Barbara Chapman of the University of Houston's Computer Science Department. "As one of Sun's Centers of Excellence, we are very excited about this opportunity to work directly with Sun and its partners to harness the industry's most potent technology - Grid Computing - for projects that ultimately benefit all of society." Geoscientists will harness the power of the Sun-supplied campus grid resources to work on a variety of very large computational problems in oil exploration. Their work, which aims to improve utilization of national energy reserves by performing highly accurate identification and quantification of hydrocarbon reserves, will be broadly disseminated to the energy industry. Computer Scientists will support this research by enhancing the grid environment. The Computer Science team will work to provide a Grid computing environment, based upon the popular Globus toolkitTM. Grid Engine software will be used to manage the execution of jobs on the chosen resources. The Sun Center of Excellence will allow industrial partners in the Houston area and beyond to experiment with grid technology and Sun's Grid Engine software to improve their exploitation of compute resources. Sun's Center of Excellence (COE) program promotes open standards and collaboration to help build new technologies that advance academic research. The University of Houston is the first COE to combine Grid Computing with the Geoscience discipline. For more information visit www.sun.com