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Va. Tech Aims For Computer Ranking

Posted on: Thursday, 4 September 2003, 06:00 CDT

Virginia Tech plans to spend $5 million building a supercomputer that could rank among the most powerful in the academic world, university officials announced Tuesday.

Apple Computer is shipping about 1,100 of the company's G5 Power Macs - a dual-processor computer being billed as the world's fastest personal computer - to Tech during the next month. Tech engineers and computer scientists then hope to connect, or "cluster," the G5s to create a supercomputer capable of handling massive calculations needed in such fields as nanoscale electronics and computational chemistry.

Tech is racing to complete the project by Oct. 1, the deadline for consideration in a popular ranking of the world's top supercomputers. The world's current top-ranked supercomputer, at the Earth Simulator Center in Yokohama, Japan, performed 35.9 trillion calculations per second, according to the 21st edition of the "TOP500" list of supercomputers.

Tech President Charles Steger told members of the university's governing board on Aug. 24 that the computer cluster could rank among the Top 10 in the academic world, but those in charge of the project backed off a specific prediction Tuesday. Glenda Scales, assistant dean of computing and distance learning at Tech, said in a statement that the university "will have one of the top-ranked supercomputing facilities in the world."

Tech plans to spend $5.2 million over the next five years on the computer cluster, which eventually will be housed in the university's fledgling Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science. The project comes at a time when the university's academic departments are struggling to fulfill students' educational needs in the wake of a $72 million reduction in state support.

Hassan Aref, dean of Tech's College of Engineering, said the significance of the computer cluster lies in its capacity to handle advanced research and, thereby, increase the university's prominence in the computational sciences. Aref and others hope Tech's acquisition of the cluster could lead to additional research grants from the federal government and private sector.

Another difference, Aref said, is that Tech and its corporate partners are trying to build the cluster themselves on "really a quite modest budget" rather than buying a supercomputer from a manufacturer.

"For a university to do this from scratch, I think it would be quite unique," said Aref, who joined Tech earlier this year after working as the chief scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

The Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, a state institute run by Tech, has two supercomputers at its location in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center.

On the Net:

top500.org.

Kevin Miller can be reached

at 381-1676

or kevin.miller@roanoke.com.

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