AUBURN, Ala. — Auburn University took another step towards the top of collegiate research last week when it unveiled a $1 million campus supercomputer that was built in-house at the university. The supercomputer was created with the help of 30 research groups on campus, and is expected to bring in top researchers to the school.
The computer is named Hopper, after the late computer scientist Rear Adm. Grace Hopper. Researchers quickly assembled Hopper in one of the most secure buildings on campus.
“Just a few days ago, this entire floor was covered with components of this machine,” Bliss Bailey, interim CIO of the university, told OA News. “There were hundreds of devices; there was packing material, cardboard boxes, plastic bags.” The computer now stands whole and runs the length and height of a classroom wall.
The journey to having a supercomputer at Auburn began a few years ago with smaller computing clusters.
“This is what’s called a high-performance computing cluster,” John Liu, Auburn University associate provost and associate vice president for research, explained. “That means it’s a collection of basically off-the-shelf computing parts that are tied together to work together in parallel.”
The new supercomputer is energy-efficient, reliable, and secure. Hopper is the most attractive girl at the dance to researchers. Its software can distribute information to different clusters, has more memory, faster speeds, and access to central storage.
Dr. Nicholas Giordano, dean of the College of Sciences and Mathematics, told OA News the new supercomputer will greatly help with research. “A lot of our research just needs computing. Not only is computing important, but computing is becoming more and more important. In order to be competitive as a researcher, but also to be competitive as a place to hire the best young faculty, a facility like this gives us an advantage.”
Other researchers have said that the data sets they use are too large to analyze on a laptop or desktop. This new supercomputer will not have a problem with large sets of data.
Auburn announced a new hiring plan this fall that would focus on clustering interdepartmental research areas and pool resources. This would also help attract top-tier researchers to the university.
Having an in-house supercomputer also saves grant money that would otherwise be spent on a commercial supercomputer.
This fact alone has already attracted new talent like biological sciences faculty Dr. Tonia Schwartz and Dr. Laurie Stevison to Auburn. said “I’m a new faculty hire, and coming in, I was very excited to come to a university that was going to have the computational power to do what I need to do in my research.”
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