At Iowa State, the delivery of its new IBM Blue Gene/L hardware on Jan. 20 marked the first-ever supercomputer on the school's Ames campus, according to Srinivas Aluru, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the university. The machine, which offers peak performance of 5.7 trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS) from its 2,048 IBM PowerPC 440 CPUs, will allow university researchers to work on the corn genome project, study proteins in organisms and perform other research, Aluru said.

The new machine is more than 10 times as powerful as any high-performance computer currently on campus, he said.

The machine ranks 73rd on the Top 500 list of supercomputers around the world. Four other universities, including Boston University, MIT, Princeton University and the University of California, San Diego, also have Blue Gene machines, Aluru said. The new machine ranks in the top 10 at U.S. colleges and universities, and among the top 15 around the world, he said. The machine was bought with a US$600,000 award from the National Science Foundation and another $650,000 from the university.

Meanwhile, at Georgia Tech, the College of Computing yesterday announced the expansion of a collaboration between the university and the ORNL, including joint appointments of staff members and the creation of a Georgia Tech minicampus at the laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The partnership expansion is being done with ORNL and UT-Battelle, a nonprofit company that manages and operates the ORNL for the U.S. Department of Energy.

Richard A. DeMillo, dean of Georgia Tech's College of Computing, said the relationship with the ORNL will broaden to provide more research opportunities for the school's faculty and students.