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Big Red II raises the bar at Indiana University

Indiana University has unveiled Big Red II, a powerful supercomputer with a processing speed of one thousand trillion floating-point operations per second (one petaflop).

Big Red II replaces the original Big Red, installed in 2006. The supercomputer, which is 25 times faster than its predecessor, will enable vital new research to be done and breakthroughs in fields ranging from medicine and physics to fine arts and global climate research. Additionally, it is expected to attract and help retain faculty whose work requires advanced data-processing power.

'There is hardly an area of research and scholarly activity where supercomputers, the most complex of human made objects, have not had an impact,' said the university's president, Michael A. McRobbie. 'With the ability to process huge amounts of data at an almost unimaginable speed, they have become an essential tool in expanding the frontiers of knowledge, addressing the world's most critical issues and probing the most fundamental questions about the universe in which we live.'

McRobbie added: 'Big Red II will ensure that Indiana University remains at the forefront in the use of high-speed and data-intensive computation in support of some of the most vital and complex research in the world.'

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