AUSTIN, Texas The University of Texas at Austin has been awarded a $6 million grant by the Intel Corp. providing equipment to do high-level computations previously possible only on supercomputers and mainframes.
The grant will be used for interdisciplinary research involving distributed multimedia, simulation and modeling, and enterprise systems and management. It will address the use of advanced Intel-based platforms in tasks involving highly complicated calculations.
The award was provided through Intel’s Technology for Education 2000 three-year, $85 million grant program, which is part of Intel’s broader, long-term support for higher education. This program will support university research and curriculum development and help place PCs, workstations, servers and networking hardware based on Intel Architecture in key research universities throughout the United States.
"Working relationships with longtime supporters such as Intel are essential if the University is to continue to be the leading research institution in the South and Southwest," said Dr. Peter Flawn, president ad interim at UT Austin.
Dr. Thomas Edgar, associate vice president for Academic Computing and Instructional Technology Services (ACITS) at UT Austin, said, "The grant will fund a broad-based, integrated research program operating across the spectrum of the University’s academic and research communities, involving arts, science, communication and engineering."
Research in all these areas will demonstrate the capabilities of, and possible challenges on, Intel Architecture across the full range of available and future systems based on Intel processors.In all, 18 project teams from 10 different colleges and organizations at UT Austin will participate in the three-year program. It has two goals: to advance the high-performance distributed computing using Intel Architecture, and to encourage a collaborative, interactive and interdisciplinary environment for learning and research “borderfree” campus.
Examples of the projects include
- A Petroleum Reservoir Simulation project, involving intensive computations previously possible only on large supercomputers.
- An Electronic Commerce Networks project to meet the real-time, efficiency and reliability challenges of an Internet-based economy.
- A Virtual Museum, offering research-quality high resolution 3-D models of fragile materials from museum, gallery and special collections to be distributed via the Web as interactive exhibits.
The research program will be led through a partnership between the Texas Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics (TICAM) and Academic Computing and Instructional Technology Services. TICAM is a general umbrella for research in computational and applied mathematics, while ACITS is UT’s key support organization for academic computing, networking and instructional technology. Edgar, of ACITS, and Dr. J. Tinsley Oden, of TICAM, are the project directors.
For additional information, visit the UT Austin webpages related to the Intel grant at http://jade.cc.utexas.edu/intel/main.html. Edgar can be reached by telephone at (512) 475-9239 or by e-mail at t.edgar@cc.utexas.edu
Information also is available at Intel’s website at http://www.intel.com, which provides a "Pressroom" selection.
