By Matthew Dublin

The Georgia Institute of Technology has just received a nice chunk of change in the form of a five-year, $12 million Track 2 award from the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure to lead a collaboration among academic and industry researchers in the development of an experimental, high-performance computing system.

The award will help Georgia Tech and its collaborators, which include Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the National Institute for Computational Sciences, Hewlett Packard, and Nvidia build two heterogeneous HPC systems that can be used to accelerate computational biology and massive visual analytics. “The user community is very excited about this strategy,” said Jeffrey Vetter, joint professor of computational science and engineering at Georgia Tech and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in a press release. “Our goal is to develop and deploy a novel, next-generation system for the computational science community that demonstrates unprecedented performance on computational science and data-intensive applications, while also addressing the new challenges of energy-efficiency."

Researchers working on molecular modeling software, such as the popular NAMD application, intended to use Nvidia's new Fermi architecture to further acceleration biomolecular simulations. The first system will combine HP servers equipped with hundreds of Intel process together with Nvidia's Fermi chips. The group plans on having the two experimental platforms up and running in early 2010.