East Tennessee is home to one of the largest concentrations of computing power and expertise in the world. Cherokee Farm provides direct access to those high-performance computing resources.
Already home to two of the 50 fastest computers on the planet—one of which is the fastest non-classified computer in the world—UT and ORNL soon will be home to two new machines that will shatter the petascale barrier, performing more than a thousand trillion calculations per second. One of these was awarded to UT, in partnership with ORNL, in fall 2007 as part of a $65 million research grant—the largest in the university’s history. It will be housed at the UT-ORNL Joint Institute for Computational Sciences.
Cherokee Farm also will have a direct link into a number of critical national and international networks, which will facilitate the movement of massive amounts of data to and from points around the state, the nation and the globe. The Global Ring Network for Advanced Applications (GLORIAD) is headquartered at UT and ORNL, and the area is linked to the NSF TeraGrid. These resources will be of massive importance in creating models of global climate, detailing ways for new drugs to interact with the body and also for predicting how materials can be formed at the nanoscale level.
UT Wins $65M National Science Foundation Supercomputing Grant For Next-Generation Computing System
The University of Tennessee has entered the ranks of the nation's elite in using supercomputing to solve the most significant scientific questions facing humanity. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $65 million to UT to build and operate one of the world's most powerful supercomputers and lead a nationwide partnership to put it to use.
[ read more about the grant ]
What is GLORIAD?
GLORIAD, the Global Ring Network for Advanced Applications Development, is built on a fiber-optic ring of networks around the northern hemisphere of the earth, providing scientists, educators and students with advanced networking tools that improve communications and data exchange, enabling active, daily collaboration on common problems.
Excerpted from GLORIAD website