April 03, 2008
To: UT System-Wide Faculty and Staff
From: President John Petersen
Today, we and our partners at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are formally announcing a $65 million grant award from the National Science Foundation that will enable us to build and operate one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
This is the largest research grant that the University of Tennessee, or any other university in the state, has ever received, and it positions UT among the nation's supercomputing elite. The grant brings tremendous opportunity, as UT and ORNL experts will use it to solve the most pressing scientific questions facing the world, in areas such as climate change, cancer research, and energy solutions. Breakthroughs in these areas obviously have potential to improve quality of life for current and future generations, and they could happen at the University of Tennessee.
This machine will have the power to conduct 1,000 trillion calculations per second. Or, if every person on earth were simultaneously able to perform one calculation per second, it would take all of us two days to complete what this computer will be able to do in one second. That’s almost unimaginable speed and capacity.
The National Science Foundation is establishing this supercomputer here to support the nation’s research agenda. The team that successfully competed for the award is led by Thomas Zacharia, who is both UT vice president for science and technology, and ORNL associate lab director for computing and computational sciences.
These are exciting times at the University of Tennessee. I invite you to learn more about the $65 million supercomputing award and plans we have for putting it to use by visiting http://www.tennessee.edu/system/news/nsf/
— John Petersen
