INDUSTRY

ASU researchers are partners in an unprecedented supercomputing project that has been awarded a five-year, $59 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas-Austin is the lead institution for the project, which will provide a high-performance computing system for the nation's research scientists and engineers. TACC and the Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences at UT-Austin will be assisted in the effort by the Fulton High-Performance Computing Initiative program in ASU's Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering, as well as by the Cornell Theory Center at Cornell University and the computer technology company Sun Microsytems. The project's goal is to deploy and support world-class high-performance systems with tremendous computing capacity and capability to enhance leading U.S. research programs. The supercomputer system is to achieve a peak performance in excess of 400 trillion floating point operations per second, providing more than 100 trillion bytes of memory and 1.7 quadrillion bytes of disk storage. Last month marked one year of operation for the Fulton School of Engineering's High-Performance Computing Initiative, which is directed by computer engineer Dan Stanzione. In its first year, the program's center has been used by more than 300 researchers, including about 75 ASU faculty members from more than 15 academic departments. More than $22 million in research has been performed at its facilities in the past year, accounting for more than 10 percent of ASU's total research expenditures. The facility started with support entirely from endowment funds, but now more than half of its operations are supported through almost $3 million in external grant funding from a variety of government and industry sources, including the NSF, the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The partnership with UT-Austin under this latest grant will enable ASU's High-Performance Computing Initiative to participate in building one of the most powerful and advanced computing systems. “Advanced computational capability is increasingly critical to research at ASU and around the world,” Stanzione says. “It's needed not only in areas that traditionally use computational simulation intensively, such as in aircraft design. It's also needed to solve problems in an ever-expanding range of research, especially such crucial areas as environmental sustainability and modeling growth strategies for the world's rapidly developing urban regions. The grant provides the kind of national leadership that will accelerate progress is these pursuits.” The grant will fund the acquisition and deployment of the new Sun system and four years of operations, and also will support to the nation's research community. TACC and its partners will provide applications optimization, large-scale data management, software tools evaluation and testing, and user training and education. High-performance computing has become a vital investigative tool in most science and engineering disciplines. It enables testing and validation of theories and analysis of the vast volumes of experimental data gathered by today's advanced scientific instruments. Increased computational power will be essential to unlocking knowledge contained in the huge collections of data being accumulated through the sophisticated technology employed in the nation's space exploration missions, including the Mars and Lunar missions supported by ASU researchers. Such systems are enabling researchers to address important problems in nearly all fields of science – from mapping the evolutionary history of all organisms throughout the history of life on Earth, to understanding the three-dimensional structure and function of proteins or predicting severe weather events. These computational resources have become indispensable to knowledge discovery in life sciences, geosciences, social sciences and engineering, producing results that have direct bearing on society and quality of life.