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When it comes to computing resources at UGA, “times are changing,”
says David
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| Faculty will have access to 12 terabytes
of usable storage, which can be expanded up to 48 terabytes—equivalent
to the amount of print on paper from 2.4 million trees. |
Landau, Distinguished Research Professor of Physics and chair of
the research computing advisory committee.
A $2.4 million grant from the UGA Research Foundation is providing
a new computing center to serve the research community.
The Research Computing Center will have a capacity to run more than
a trillion mathematical operations per second and store an amount
greater than the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress.
The center—a joint effort of the Office of the Vice President
for Research and Enterprise Information Technology Services—will
make UGA highly competitive in computing resources with other Southeastern
universities, such as Florida State University and Louisiana State
University.
“This is the first step toward providing world-class computing
resources to the UGA research community,” says Jerry NeSmith,
director of OVPR’s Office of Research Services.
The university as a whole is expected to benefit tremendously from
the RCC, which is scheduled to open in Boyd Graduate Studies Research
Center this September. Humanities scholars, especially, stand to
profit from the new facility, because it is a shared institutional
resource.
As a shared resource, the RCC aims to increase productivity and
-collaboration plus provide training and consulting services for
a wide array of research topics.
“Services, training and support are as important to the research
community as computing capacity,” NeSmith says.
Faculty will have access to 12 terabytes of usable storage, which
can be easily expanded up to 48 terabytes—equivalent to the
amount of print on paper from 2.4 million trees.
Gordhan Patel, vice president for research, has secured an additional
$1.3 million for next fiscal year, beginning July 2005.
“This is not a one-time investment that will solve all problems,”
says Patel. “This will be a continued need.”
Future plans for the RCC include a connection to the National LambdaRail,
a network dedicated specifically to research in the United States.
“This may happen in the next six months,” says Dennis
Calbos, UGA’s interim associate provost and chief information
officer.
Future plans also include one gigabit—one billion information
bits—connections from the research network to research buildings,
additional IT consultants, and a grid computing infrastructure that
will massively increase computing speed.
“The bottom line is,” says Patel, “we want to
help researchers do research.”
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