(Science news release Web site: http://www.unl.edu/pr/science.html)
Lincoln (Neb.) - Oct. 23, 1998 - The information technology tools available to University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers will take another important step forward later this fall thanks to a $750,000, three-year grant from the National Science Foundation's EPSCOR project.
The grant, with matching funds from the university, will establish the Research Computing Center, which will house a roughly $200,000 multiprocessor computing engine for research purposes. The center and its powerful computer will be the third prong of a major three-part enhancement of the university's information technology resources, joining Internet II and the Great Plains Network. NU is expected to finish logging on to Internet II and its high-end networking resources early next year. The Great Plains Network links institutions in six Great Plains states in a high-speed network.
The university has begun shopping for the new computer, but when it's installed (probably late this semester), it should quickly prove to be a valuable addition, according to Dale Finkelson, a network engineer for Networking and Operations.
"It will be something qualitatively different from anything we now have on campus for research purposes," Finkelson said. "We hope to be able to provide better assistance to people who need high-end computing for research."
Access to the computer will be governed by the advisory committee to the Research Computing Center, Finkelson said. A researcher who wants to use the computer will submit a proposal to the committee, which will review the proposal and grant access based on whether or not it requires the kind of power the new machine will have.
Ashok Samal, associate professor of computer science and engineering, is the interim project coordinator for the center and will chair the advisory committee while project coordinator Sharad Seth is on academic leave. Seth is professor of computer science and engineering and director of the Center for Commuication and Information Science.
Other members of the advisory committee are Sohrab Asgarpoor, electrical engineering; Charles Daniel, UNIX system manager, computer science and engineering; James Emal (or an alternate), IANR Communications and Information Technology; Dale Finkelson, Networking and Operations; Kent Hendrickson, associate vice chancellor, Information Services; Pam Holley-Wilcox, director, Information Technology Support; Sitaram Jaswal, physics and astronomy; Jim Merchant, Conservation and Survey; James Nau, engineering software development specialist, College of Engineering and Technology; Lorraine Olson, mechanical engineering; Christopher Tuan, civil engineering (Omaha); and Xiao Zeng, chemistry.
Finkelson said the combination of the Research Computing Center, Internet II and the Great Plains Network represents a major change in the way the university provides information technology.
"We're building some on-campus resources that we can make available to researchers to sort of 'seed' research activities here," he explained. "Then, as they outgrow our internal resources, we will have the capability to move them out to the broader resources that exist at the supercomputing centers around the country and to other universities that have research groups with same kid of facilities.
"In a very important sense, all of this is a very new
activity and really a different model for providing resources
than we've had in the past - and really on quite a different
scale."
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