As part of the expanded agreement, the school will be opening a small facility of up to 5,000 square feet at the lab where students and faculty members can do their research, he said. "It's going to be a platform for lots of interesting programs," DeMillo said.

One project involves resource-sharing among high-performance computing centers around the world, he said. For researchers, it's often difficult to transfer their work and custom applications to various machines because hardware configurations can be so varied. Some high-performance computing facilities use large clusters, while some use stand-alone supercomputers. Added to that is a mix of operating systems from Linux to AIX to proprietary Cray software, he said.

"Right now, the high-performance computing world is a patchwork quilt," DeMillo said. The problem for researchers is that often when they put their applications on larger hardware, the applications no longer work as designed. The expanded partnership will work to find answers to solve these problems, he said.

The first joint faculty appointment between the two institutions is that of Thomas Zacharia, the associate lab director for the ORNL's Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate, who was also named a professor at Georgia Tech's College of Computing.

At Iowa State, the corn genome research is intended to help find new ways to engineer sturdier, healthier corn, which is becoming an increasingly important alternative fuel source, said Patrick Schnable, a professor at the school's Center for Plant Genomics. The corn genome is a genetic blueprint for how corn is assembled and how it develops.