INDUSTRY

Thanks to a recent agreement between IBM and the Southeastern Universities Research Association, or SURA, member universities will soon have access to a vastly improved regional network of high performance computing resources through the SURAgrid Program. LSU will be among the first to use this advanced system. There are currently two high performance IBM computers being installed on campus, both of which will soon be added to the SURAgrid pool. “The growth of LSU’s focus on grid computing under Ed Seidel at the Center for Computation and Technology, or CCT, is one of the things that has pushed LSU out in front,” said Gary Crane, director of IT initiatives at SURA. LSU has been involved with SURAgrid since its beginnings. Most recently, Seidel and his team at CCT were responsible for developing connections with IBM that eventually led to a partnership between the corporation and SURA. Aside from enhanced capabilities, this relationship will provide considerable discounts for member institutions purchasing IBM high- performance computer systems. SURAgrid is on track to provide a distributed computational resource with a capacity of nearly 10 TeraFlops to its 28 participating universities by the end of this year. “Our competition is not our neighboring states,” said Jerry Draayer, president and CEO of SURA. “For us to really be sufficiently robust to compete toe-to-toe with other regions, we need to join forces with our neighbors to move the Southern agenda collectively forward. The LSU team has been in the forefront in helping us to do that.” Because of its involvement, LSU will also take part in a team demonstration at the upcoming Supercomputing Conference, held Nov. 11-17 in Tampa. Together with SURA, IBM and the University of North Carolina, LSU will demonstrate coastal ocean modeling and storm prediction capabilities that are being developed in part because of access to SURAgrid’s high performance grid computing platform.