By Matthew Dublin

The still-niche field of flash memory-based HPC systems has just received a serious shot in the arm thanks to the National Science Foundation (NSF)-the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego has been awarded a five-year, $20 million grant from the NSF to build and operate a supercomputer called Gordon (as in Flash Gordon, get it? Who says supercomputer folk aren't comedic geniuses?). Gordon will be comprised of a large amount of flash memory to help speed up computation jobs currently made "sluggish" by tradational spinning disk hard drives. Gordon is an expansion on the SDSC's Dash system, which is the first supercomputer to use flash devices. "We are clearly excited about the potential for Gordon,” said SDSC Interim Director Michael Norman, who is also the project’s principal investigator, in a release this week. “This HPC system will allow researchers to tackle a growing list of critical ‘data-intensive’ problems. These include the analysis of individual genomes to tailor drugs to specific patients, the development of more accurate models to predict the impact of earthquakes on buildings and other structures, and simulations that offer greater insights into what’s happening to the planet’s climate.”