Indiana University acquires SUN Starfire

 Palo Alto 23 Feb 00 Sun and Indiana University (IU) start a Center of Excellence at IU that will offer researchers and students new, more powerful resources and opportunities in the areas of high performance computing, networking and storage, data mining and visualization. As part of the Center of Excellence, IU will acquire a 50 Gflop/s peak Sun Enterprise 10000 Starfire supercomputer.

"Indiana University's leadership in information technology and IT research is highly respected in both the academic world and the business communities," said McNealy. "With this announcement, Sun commits itself to an ongoing, highly integrated relationship with IU that will have enormous payoffs for students, researchers and others who benefit from their efforts."

The Sun Enterprise 10000 server is one of the world's leading servers and, with 64 processors and 64 GB of memory, IU's Sun Enterprise 10000 server will have a peak processing capacity of 51.2 GFLOPS (one billion floating operations per second, a benchmark for measuring the speed of microprocessors). The IU system is expected to appear on the list of the 500 largest supercomputers in the world when that list is revised in June. At IU, this server will be used in a variety of disciplines, including the rendering of graphics and virtual reality images, as well as for research in the fields of astronomy, chemistry, engineering, physics and computer science. It provides a substantial expansion of IU's capability for shared memory supercomputing, allowing various kinds of computer programs in these areas to run at peak efficiency.

Sun and IU are finalizing the initial joint research programs at the new Center of Excellence. The first of these are expected to be in high performance computing, especially in the design of Java technology extensions for supercomputers and high performance networking and storage using Internet2. Further projects are expected to follow in data mining, visualization and other areas.

In addition to the establishment of the Center of Excellence, Sun's McNealy also announced the funding of a fellowship at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business. The fellowship, in the amount of $25,000 each year for two years, will be awarded to a deserving MBA student. The student will use the money to cover education expenses, including tuition, housing, computer equipment and textbooks.

 

Ad Emmen

[News on Advanced IT]   [Calendar]   [Analysis]   [IT in Medicine]