The National Science Foundation (NSF) has made a $59 million five-year award to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin to develop a high-performance computer that will support complicated large scale science and engineering computing experiments. As an example, NSF shows bacterial chromatophore organelle (above), as a possible target to simulate “10 millions atoms that make up 200 proteins, 5,000 chlorophyl molecules, water, ions and many lipids.”
The supercomputer’s projected power:
In its final configuration in 2007, the supercomputer will have a peak performance in excess of 420 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops), making it one of the most powerful supercomputer systems in the world. It will also provide over 100 trillion bytes (terabytes) of memory and 1.7 quadrillion bytes (petabytes) of disk storage. The system is based on Sun Fire(TM) x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers and Sun StorageTek(TM) disk and tape storage technologies, and will use AMD’s forthcoming quad-core processors.
Read more from the press release at NSF…