In this project, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (UTK) will provide a significant new computing capability to the research community. It will provide the capability for researchers to tackle large and complex research challenges in a wide range of areas. In partnership with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), UTK will acquire, deploy and operate a sequence of large, well balanced, high-performance computational resources on behalf of the science and engineering research community. Initially, a large teraflop/s Cray XT4 system will be deployed. This will subsequently be upgraded to a Cray Baker system with a peak performance of over one petaflop/s and a large amount of main memory. These systems will be sited at the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, a center established by the University of Tennessee and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), housed in a building constructed by the state of Tennessee on the ORNL campus. The new systems will form part of NSF's TeraGrid high-performance cyberinfrastructure, doubling the computational capacity of the TeraGrid in one year.
This award will permit investigators across the country to conduct innovative research in a number of areas. Examples of recent impacts of the TeraGrid's high performance computing resources in research, taken from NSF's "Highlights" database, include:
. The first atomic level simulation of a life form. These simulations of the satellite tobacco mosaic virus will help scientists determine what factors are important to the virus' structural integrity and how those factors might influence assembly of the virus inside host cells. . Avalanches, oil spills, thunderstorm fronts, and the dust cloud following a building collapse all generate heavier fluid intrusions into a lighter environment. Mathematical modeling and large scale simulations give engineers the means to study these threedimensional flows, which are frequently immeasurable due to their destructive power. . Over the last year, scientists have used more than one million CPU hours on TeraGrid systems to optimize the process by which the signals generated by Higgs decay are separated from the potentially overwhelming background noise. . One of the best tools economists have to account for the vagaries of human decision-making as it affects economic forecasting is the life cycle model. Using a process called "backward induction," for the first time, made it possible to apply massively parallel computing to the life cycle model. TeraGrid systems were used to solve the largest, most realistically specified versions of the life cycle model ever attempted. . Proteins are the building blocks of the body, and biologists have learned that the myriad ways they function from fighting off infection and building new bones to storing a memory depend on the precise details of their 3 D shapes. But determining the shapes of proteins has been a slow and exacting process. By dramatically accelerating scientific research, modern supercomputers are opening the door to medical advances such as rational drug design.
This project manifests broader impacts in a number of areas. . The project enhances the infrastructure for research and education through the provision of facilities for high-end computing integrated into the TeraGrid. Integration into the TeraGrid permits the facility to be used, relatively transparently, to provide back-end services to the education portals within the TeraGrid Science and Engineering Gateways. . The project partners at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research will collaborate to develop and offer advanced training in high-end computing topics including scaling and performance optimization. This training program will include in-person training at remote institutions where there are at least ten attendees. Training sessions will also be provided at large science and engineering workshops and conferences. . Leveraging funding from a variety of sources, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville will launch a multidisciplinary Intercollegiate Graduate Program in Computational Science that will offer training in computational science to students in a wide range of disciplines. . Many of the users of the proposed system will be graduate students and post-doctoral researchers working in research groups that use high-end computing in their investigations. It is anticipated that the computational resources provided by this project will play a role in over one hundred graduate theses. . The project will work with the Oak Ridge Associated Universities' Council of Minority-Serving Institutions to recruit a diverse group of users from underrepresented groups.
One of the primary partners in this project, ORNL, operates a portfolio of existing programs aimed at introducing pre-college and college students to the science and engineering uses of highend computing and at broadening the participation of underrepresented groups in science and engineering. The types of research conducted with the new system will be integrated into these programs.
