The state's newest supercomputer is expected to place Baton Rouge in the top 25 supercomputing sites in the world, according to a release from the Louisiana Board of Regents.
On Monday, the Louisiana Board of Regents announced the recent addition of a new 50-teraflop supercomputer to boost the computing power of the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative, a fiber optic network enhancing the computing capacity at the state's higher education institutions.
The newest addition is nicknamed Queen Bee after Governor Kathleen Blanco in honor of her support of $40 million over the next 10 years for LONI.
With the addition of the Queen Bee, the state's total research supercomputing capacity is at 100 teraflops.
A teraflop is a measure of how many computations can be done per second, explained Steve Landry, UL's vice president for academic affairs who sits on the LONI Management Council.
"It wasn't too many years ago that we were trying to build a one teraflop machine," Landry said. "Now we have this 50-teraflop, then groups of 5 teraflop machines connected by LONI that can work together on a single computation."
That's major computing power enabling researchers to work on complex computations like water modeling or storm modeling, Landry said.
While supercomputers already are up and running at research institutions across the state, including UL, the Queen Bee is located in downtown Baton Rouge in the state's Information Services Building.
LONI is functional, however there are still segments across the state that need to be connected.
Queen Bee's capacity is on par with Harvard University and Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, according to the release.
Other universities part of LONI, include LSU, Louisiana Tech, LSU Health Sciences Centers in New Orleans and Shreveport, Southern University, Tulane University and UNO.
Every six months, the top 500 supercomputing sites are released. The next list will be released in a few weeks at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.
Publish Date:
06-13-2007
