For decades, computers were prized resources that only the government and top universities could afford. Today, they are ubiquitous. But as computing power has grown, so have our ambitions, which have spawned a new breed of supercomputers.

Now Brown University has obtained such a machine, an IBM “high-performance computing system” with 1,440 processors, a cluster that can do more than 14 trillion calculations within a second, a peak-performance speed of more than 14 teraflops, and 4.5 terabytes of memory.

Altogether, the HPC system provides about 20 times the computing capacity that was previously available at Brown – and it’s going to be available not just to researchers on that campus, but to the University of Rhode Island, the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and by next year, to other academic institutions, hospitals and other nonprofits across the state.

Clyde Briant, vice president for research at Brown, recently discussed the system with Providence Business News.

Full Story: Brown supercomputer available to state, firms Source: Providence Business News, November 30th, 2009 Author: Marion Davis Added on December 1st, 2009 at 10:26 am, by Matt Mikula