OSU awarded grant for ""Cowboy"" supercomputer
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
The National Science Foundation has awarded Oklahoma State University’s High Performance
Computing Center a $908,812 grant to fund a cluster supercomputer to be named “Cowboy.”
It will support computing-intensive research for students, faculty and staff at OSU,
as well as researchers across Oklahoma, according to Dana Brunson, center manager.
“Our high performance computing needs at OSU have increased dramatically with usage
up more than eight times in the last three years, so this NSF award is critical to
provide the state-of-the-art infrastructure to support computer-intensive research
and training for a broad variety of applications here and throughout the state,” said
Brunson, who also serves as lead researcher on the project. Based on experience to
date, Brunson expects the number of users for the new supercomputer to double every
12 months.
She compares the cluster supercomputer to a collection of personal computers joined
by a network and software that allows them to work on problems much larger than any
one of them could handle alone. “Installation can take from a few days to a few weeks
and the supercomputer is accessed through a secure internet connection with free software
that is readily available and comes standard on some PCs.”
Brunson, who also serves as co-chair for the upcoming Oklahoma Supercomputing Symposium,
says she’s looking forward to offering more specifics on the new cluster supercomputer
at the conference set for Wednesday, Oct. 12, on the University of Oklahoma campus
in Norman. “Both the computer and the symposium are part of a broader mission set
by the Oklahoma Cyberinfrastructure Initiative to help everyone in the state use our
computer resources.”