(Press-News.org) GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The University of Florida today unveiled the state's most powerful supercomputer, a machine that will help researchers find life-saving drugs, make decades-long weather forecasts and improve armor for troops.
The HiPerGator supercomputer and recent tenfold increase in the size of the university's data pipeline make UF one of the nation's leading public universities in research computing.
"If we expect our researchers to be at the forefront of their fields, we need to make sure they have the most powerful tools available to science, and HiPerGator is one of those tools," UF President Bernie Machen said. "The computer removes the physical limitations on what scientists and engineers can discover. It frees them to follow their imaginations wherever they lead."
For UF immunologist David Ostrov, HiPerGator will slash a months-long test to identify safe drugs to a single eight-hour work day.
"HiPerGator can help get drugs get from the computer to the clinic more quickly. We want to discover and deliver safe, effective therapies that protect or restore people's health as soon as we can," Ostrov said. "UF's supercomputer will allow me to spend my time on research instead of computing."
The Dell machine has a peak speed of 150 trillion calculations per second. Put another way, if each calculation were a word in a book, HiPerGator could read the millions of volumes in UF libraries several hundred times per second.
UF worked with Dell, Terascala, Mellanox and AMD to build a machine that makes supercomputing power available to all UF faculty and their collaborators and spreads HiPerGator's computing power over multiple simultaneous jobs instead of focused on a single task at warp speed. HiPerGator features the latest in high-performance computing technology from Dell and AMD with 16,384 processing cores; a Dell|Terascala HPC Storage Solution (DT-HSS 4.5) with the industry's fastest open-source parallel file system; and Mellanox's FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand interconnects that provide the highest bandwidth and lowest latency. Together these features provide UF researchers unprecedented computation and faster access to data to quickly further their research.
UF unveiled HiPerGator on Tuesday as part of a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the 25,000-square-foot UF Data Center built to house it. HiPerGator was purchased and assembled for $3.4 million, and the Data Center was built for $15 million.
Also today, the university announced that it is the first in the nation to fully implement the Internet2 Innovation Platform, a combination of new technologies and services that will further speed research computing.
INFORMATION:
Media Contact
Chris Moran, chrismoran@ufl.edu
Contact
Erik Deumens, deumens@ufl.edu
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LA JOLLA, CA---Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have identified a protein that drives the formation of pituitary tumors in Cushing's disease, a development that may give clinicians a therapeutic target to treat this potentially life-threatening disorder.
The protein, called TR4 (testicular orphan nuclear receptor 4), is one of the human body's 48 nuclear receptors, a class of proteins found in cells that are responsible for sensing hormones and, in response, regulating the expression of specific genes. Using a genome scan, the Salk team discovered ...
DARIEN, IL – A new study suggests that your level of sleepiness or alertness during the day may be related to the type of food that you eat.
Results show that higher fat consumption was associated with increased objective daytime sleepiness, while higher carbohydrate intake was associated with increased alertness. There was no relationship between protein consumption and sleepiness or alertness. These findings were independent of the subjects' gender, age, and body mass index as well as the total amount of sleep they were getting and their total caloric intake.
"Increased ...
DARIEN, IL – A new study suggests that regularity of bedtime prior to initiation of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy is an important factor that may influence treatment compliance in adults with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA).
Results show that bedtime variability was a significant predictor of CPAP adherence, which was defined as four or more hours of treatment use per night. The odds of one-month CPAP non-adherence were 3.7 times greater for every one unit increase in habitual, or pre-treatment, bedtime variability.
"Long-term use of CPAP, such as ...
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Boston (May 7, 2013) – The first successful cornea transplant with donor endothelial tissue preloaded by an eye bank has been performed at Massachusetts Eye and Ear in Boston, Mass. Roberto Pineda II, M.D., Director of the Refractive Surgery Service at Mass. Eye and Ear, and an Associate Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, recently performed the groundbreaking transplant.
Dr. Pineda performed the surgery utilizing donor endothelial tissue that was prepared and pre-loaded into EndoGlide™ (Angiotech Pharmaceuticals, Inc.) cartridges at the Lions Eye Institute ...
WASHINGTON, May 7, 2013 – From New York City's Central Park to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, America's urban forests store an estimated 708 million tons of carbon, an environmental service with an estimated value of $50 billion, according to a recent U.S. Forest Service study.
Annual net carbon uptake by these trees is estimated at 21 million tons and $1.5 billion in economic benefit.
In the study published recently in the journal Environmental Pollution, Dave Nowak, a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service's Northern Research Station, and his colleagues ...
(PHILADELPHIA) An international group of investigators, led by researchers at Thomas Jefferson University's Kimmel Cancer Center, have solved the mystery of why a substantial percentage of castrate-resistant metastatic prostate cancer cells contain abnormally high levels of the pro-growth protein Stat5. They discovered that the gene that makes the protein is amplified — duplicated many times over — in these cancer cells, which allows them to produce excess amounts of the oncogenic protein.
The study, reported in the May 7 issue of the American Journal of Pathology, found ...
Enzymes could break down cell walls faster – leading to less expensive biofuels for transportation – if two enzyme systems are brought together in an industrial setting, new research by the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory suggests.
A paper on the breakthrough, "Fungal Cellulases and Complexed Cellulosomal Enzymes Exhibit Synergistic Mechanisms in Cellulose Deconstruction," appears in the current edition of Energy and Environmental Science. Co-authors include five scientists from NREL and one from the Weizmann Institute in Israel.
The Energy ...
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have quantified the significant value that concentrating solar power (CSP) plants can add to an electric grid.
The NREL researchers evaluated the operational impacts of CSP systems with thermal energy storage within the California electric grid managed by the California Independent System Operator (CAISO). NREL used a commercial production cost model called PLEXOS to help plan system expansion, to evaluate aspects of system reliability, and to estimate fuel cost, emissions, and ...
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — It was a controversial move when a health insurer began requiring people who were obese to literally pay the price of not doing anything about their weight – but it worked, a new study finds.
When people had to choose between paying up to 20 percent more for health insurance or exercising more, the majority of enrollees met fitness goals one step at a time via an Internet-tracked walking program, according to a joint study by the University of Michigan Health System and Stanford University.
Researchers evaluated a group of people insured by Blue ...
