The National Science Foundation has awarded Colorado State University (CSU) $627,326 in stimulus funds for a centralised high-performance computing system available to all university researchers. Beginning operation on 14 January, faculty and post-doctoral, graduate and undergraduate students, will benefit from the computer, which will enable modelling, simulation and analysis.
The new ISTeC high-performance computer is a Cray XT6m model with 1,248 cores, 1.6 Tbytes of main memory and 32 Tbytes of disk storage. It will support larger and more complex problems in science and engineering, especially for data-intensive applications; add greater physical fidelity to existing models; facilitate the application of computing to new areas of research and discovery; and support training to attract new researchers to computational science, engineering and mathematics.
A principal focus of the system will be data- and computing-intensive applications in NSF-funded research areas at CSU, such as the design of extreme ultraviolet lasers, weather forecasting, computational physics, climate change, atmospheric modelling, bioinformatics, network traffic analysis, robotics, computational electromagnetics, remote sensing, robust resource allocation and magnetic materials. The system will also be a focal point and catalyst for collaborations among multidisciplinary groups of researchers.
