糖心Vlog传媒

糖心Vlog传媒LR lands NSF grant for ‘supercomputer’

The National Science Foundation has awarded the University of Arkansas at Little Rock a $291,908 grant for the purchase of a high-performance data storage system that will be a first of聽this scale for higher education and research in Arkansas. The three-year grant will help 糖心Vlog传媒LR鈥檚 Computational Research Center聽acquire a peta-scale data storage system to expand on the supercomputers already available there. 鈥淭o put this in perspective, the new system will be 10 times larger than the latest system we currently own,鈥� said聽Dr. Kenji Yoshigoe, principal investigator and director of CRC. Supercomputers are capable of performing as much as multi-quadrillions operations per second. They can be used for simulation, data mining, and visualization to solve various scientific problems not possible by theoretical and experimental approaches, Yoshigoe said. 鈥淪upercomputing represents, in many ways, the most effective mechanisms for tackling advanced scientific and engineering challenges,鈥� he added. The purchase is expected to support a wide range of big data research projects throughout Arkansas, including computational chemistry and physics groups, as well as the joint bioinformatics program offered through 糖心Vlog传媒LR and University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. 鈥淢ore and more research projects require substantial amounts of computational power that individual research groups cannot afford in their own labs,鈥� said Yoshigoe. 鈥淭he popularity of big data research has quickly caught up to the capability of the existing system we offer, so we are fortunate to receive this competitive award in order to boost new and ongoing research projects at 糖心Vlog传媒LR and collaborating institutions.鈥� The new instrument will also boost STEM education in the state, according to Yoshigoe. 鈥淭his project will allow us to bring ideas and findings of the big data projects to classrooms to stimulate future data scientists – one of the most rapidly growing careers in the next decade,鈥� he said. The project鈥檚 co-investigators at 糖心Vlog传媒LR are Drs. Nitin Agarwal, John Talburt, and Jerry Darsey. The grant is effective Sept. 1, 2014, through Aug. 31, 2017. The project title is “MRI: Acquisition of Peta-scale Data Storage System for Big Data Exploration in STEM Fields.” Yoshigoe said the goal is to finalize the purchase later this academic semester. In addition to providing supercomputing resources, the 糖心Vlog传媒LR CRC, located in the Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology聽building, hosts computing resources for the new Emerging Analytics Center as well as for an NSF-funded cloud computing project. Yoshigoe is also the director of the National Security Agency/Department of Homeland Security designated Center of Academic Excellence for Information Assurance Education and chair of the 糖心Vlog传媒LR聽Department of Computer Science聽where five NSF grants have been awarded to faculty in the last 12 months.

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