FOR RELEASE: Aug. 29, 1997
Contact: Roger Segelken
Office: (607) 255-9736
Internet: [email protected]
Compuserve: Larry Bernard 72650,565
http://www.news.cornell.edu
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Complex computing problems as different as modeling Earth's
climate system, predicting effects of regulatory change in the dairy
industry or serving a semester's worth of lecture videos to student
dormitories will operate on a scalable distributed network of powerful
desktop computers, thanks in part to a $6 million grant from Intel Corp. to
Cornell University.
The grant from the Santa Clara, Calif., computing equipment manufacturer is
one of 12 to American universities in Intel's three-year, $85 million
"Technology for Education 2000" program to support research and curriculum
development in computationally demanding fields.
"This $6 million grant from Intel will help create a new learning
environment at Cornell," said University Provost Don M. Randel. "This
environment will make it easier for people to work together as effective
teams, it will engage students in problems with 'real world complexity' and
it will support multiple styles of learning."
Building a scalable distributed system is the best way to serve thousands
of clients with complex computing needs, according to Daniel P.
Huttenlocher, associate professor of computer science and one of the
planners of the proposed network at Cornell.
"We intend to use high-speed communications networks and substantial
desktop and server computing power to deliver information in ways that are
more visual, more customizable and more interactive than has ever been
attempted in an academic setting," Huttenlocher said. "We will create
'anything-anytime-anywhere' access to information by decoupling location
and function."
"Students and faculty will be able to collaborate on projects across
campus, access lectures from dormitories and search library materials from
any desktop computer," said Dean B. Krafft, director of computing
facilities for the Department of Computer Science, noting that Cornell was
among the first universities to wire every dormitory room with high-speed
network connections and now is building a 150-Mbit switched campus
"backbone."
The Intel grant will provide selected Pentium II-based processors and
workstations, software and training as well as upgrades to more powerful
Intel processors as they reach the marketplace. The scalable distributed
computing system will support a variety of curriculum-development and
research projects (see attached list of examples) for students and faculty
members in five university units: the College of Engineering, the College
of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the S.C. Johnson Graduate School of
Management, the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of
Architecture, Art and Planning.
Commenting on the grants, Intel's Corporate Contributions Manager Tim
Saponas said, "The long-term success of our industry and other industries
depends on the quality of U.S. research universities, their computing
infrastructure and the skills of their students. We are pleased to be able
to support some of the best universities in the country with
state-of-the-art tools to carry out computationally intensive research
projects." Also receiving Intel grants are the universities of California
at Berkeley, Michigan at Ann Arbor, Texas at Austin, Wisconsin at Madison,
Southern California and Washington, California Institute of Technology,
Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and Purdue University.
"If we are successful in achieving our most ambitious goal, of
fundamentally transforming the ways in which information is created and
disseminated in the university," Provost Randel said, "then Cornell will
serve as a national model for universities in the information age."
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Examples of computational, curriculum-development and research projects
planned with Intel grant to Cornell University
-- Create a scalable distributed computation resource (SDCR): Servers and
desktop machines based on Intel Architecture (IA) will become integrated
parts of a massive computing environment. Using the Advanced Resource
Management System (ARMS), computational jobs will run on appropriately
scaled resources, ranging from a small number of nodes in a departmental
cluster to additional machines in divisions, colleges, all the way to the
total computational resource composed of hundreds of IA processors.
-- Molecular dynamics simulations in chemical engineering: Researchers
plan to use the SDCR system for massive computational tasks such as
predicting macroscopic properties of fluids and materials from
molecular-level information.
-- Environmental Computing Laboratory: Climate system modeling will help
researchers understand the relationships between land and sea surface
conditions and the features of atmospheric dynamics and precipitation.
Digital map servers in the environmental laboratory will make dynamic,
customized information available to land owners, engineers, resource
managers and farmers, as well as to students and researchers.
-- Interactive numerical help center for physics students: Simulation
modules for interactive learning -- in such topics as electron transport,
lattice vibrations, harmonic motion and two-dimensional wave interference
-- will be accessible to more than 2,000 freshman and sophomore students in
engineering physics and pre-medical physics courses on an
anything-anytime-anywhere basis.
-- Computational biology parallel processing cluster: A 56-node parallel
processing Pentium cluster will include high-performance graphics
workstations for macromolecular modeling and biophysical imaging. The
cluster also will participate in the SDCR to provide the most efficient
distributed use of computing cycles across campus.
-- Predicting effects of technological and regulatory change: Researchers
in the Cornell Program on Dairy Markets and Policy can analyze impacts of
changes in technology, demographics, economics and the regulatory
environments to advise policy-makers, industry leaders and individual
producers.
--Next generation distributed digital library: Beginning with the more
than 27,000 works housed in Cornell's Johnson Museum of Art, the digital
library plans to capture the full range of intellectual content housed and
generated at the university, from technical papers and reports to bird
songs, crop databases and new works of digital art.
-- Solving QCD: Physicists propose to use a small number of Intel's most
powerful desktop workstations for a task that has been the province of the
largest supercomputers -- solving quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the
fundamental theory of proton substructure.
-- Investment research: Intel equipment in the Parker Center for
Investment Research Initiatives of the Johnson Graduate School of
Management will integrate real-time data on stock prices and quotes from
global markets to perform financial analyses for a student-managed
investment fund, operating from a state-of-the-art trading room in the
renovated Sage Hall.
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