A new supercomputer run under a partnership between IBM and Brown University will be used to tackle "grand challenges" facing the state of Rhode Island, including health, education, energy and climate change.
The multimillion dollar supercomputer will be the most powerful computing system in the state, according to developers, and will be hosted at the university. Brown and IBM will hold a series of discussions between global scientific experts over the next several months to discuss potential research topics for the supercomputer.
"Combined, the supercomputer and the symposia allow us to begin to tackle our state’s most sobering challenges, thus allowing for economic growth and stability through productivity, innovation and competitiveness," said Brown vice president for research Clyde Briant.
The supercomputer can perform more than 14 trillion calculations per second, making it 50 times faster than anything previously available at Brown. University faculty and researchers say that the new computing partnership will allow them to conduct research projects with large, intricate datasets on campus, thus increasing potential for interdisciplinary projects and funding for major initiatives.
Potential research areas for the supercomputer include analyses of the terrain of planetary bodies such as Mars; studies of the web of animal life and ecosystems; genomic studies for the development of drugs for specific diseases such as cancer; and inquiries into the mechanics of human and animal movement.
"We live in an era where computer-enabled research cuts across all research and opens entirely new pursuits and innovations,” said Brown Center for Computation and Visualization director and applied mathematics professor Jan Hesthaven.
Supercomputers are machines on the cutting edge of processing and calculation capacity. The world’s fastest computer is currently the Jaguar, a machine built by Cray and hosted at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a national research center run by the U.S. Department of Energy.