A&M-Commerce acquires supercomputer

Published: Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Updated: Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Media Communications

From left to right: Frank Brandon, L-3 director of research and development; Eddie Payne, L-3 vice president and chief of operations; Jack Cooke, L-3 senior vice president; Dr. Dan Jones, A&M-Commerce president; Dr. Larry Lemanski, A&M-Commerce provost and vice president for academic and student affairs; Dr. Christine Evans, dean of the college of arts and sciences at A&M-Commerce; Dr. Sang Suh; head of computer science and information systems at A&M-Commerce; Ken Stroud, L-3 engineering fellow.

Texas A&M University-Commerce recently acquired a new supercomputer thanks to a partnership with L-3 Communications Integrated Systems Group in Greenville.

According to a press release by the university, the computer is a 1920 core Nvidia Tesla personal GPU. GPU computing is the use of a GPU (graphics processing unit) to do general purpose scientific and engineering computing, according to NVIDIA’s official website. The computer will be used for scientific research and modeling problems.

“The Nvidia GPU computer has a theoretical peak performance of 616 gigaflops (a billion operations per second) double precision, or up to 7.5 teraflops (a trillion operations per second) single precision,” head of the computer science and information systems department Dr. Sang Suh said.

The computer was purchased via a donation provided by L-3.

“L-3 gave us an equipment grant in the amount of $25,000 last fall,” Suh said.

A&M-Commerce and L-3 are also working on collaborative research and are expected to continue working on a five-year vision and consortium to expand academic programs in the computer science department.

“This consortium will also help us with our new Ph.D. program in computational science which is being proposed this semester,” Suh said. “We strongly hope this new proposal for the Ph.D. program will be approved by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board in early fall.”