The grant is for a two-year period, and will cover both equipment acquisitions and services, Intel said last week.
According to Dr. Steven Koonin, vice president and provost at Caltech, the grant will be used to support various projects that have been selected because of their computational demands, curriculum impact, and high visibility. Specifically, the $2.3 million will be targeted to five ongoing programs at Caltech, as well as the new ASCI program funded in late July by the Department of Energy. The ongoing programs are as follows:
·Improvement of the Computer Science Department's instructional laboratory by replacing existing equipment with Intel-based architecture.
·Improvements of the Gordon and Betty Moore Laboratory of Engineering to further progress in the Reliable Array of Independent Nodes (RAIN) project; the Data Compression Laboratory and its research on data compression, mining, and speech recognition; and the Learning Systems Laboratory and its research in learning from hints with applications ranging from finance to medicine.
·Creation of an Intel-based computer lab for the Humanities and Social Sciences Division for research in experimental economics. With the grant support, Caltech will continue to develop its world leadership in software development for social science applications.
·Progress is ongoing research in the area of plasma chemistry. Currently supported by Sematech, Inc., the work is aimed at applying basic research on calculating electron collisions to practical problems such as semiconductor etching. Because of the huge number of quantum-mechanical calculations necessary to model the collisions, the grant will allow the investigators to construct a virtual parallel supercomputer for the research.
·The Center for Advanced Computing is working on several initiatives, including the Beowulf clusters, which links personal computer processors together to form an inexpensive cluster with supercomputer capabilities. Other CACR projects include scalable I/O to provide a very high-speed server for scientific data and data-mining applications; and the development of Web-based data-intensive applications to improve computational ability in areas such as space science, high-energy physics, and environmental science.
The new ASCI program in the Department of Energy has designated Caltech as one of five university partner in the country for enhancing the state of the art of high-fidelity computer simulation. Caltech's part in the five-year program is to model the response of materials to intense shock waves caused by explosions or impact at high velocity.
The Intel grant will allow Caltech to use some Intel equipment as part of a matching component.
"Caltech is committed to the successful implementation of this proposal," Koonin said last week. "We sincerely appreciate the invitation to participate in this exciting project."
Contact: Robert Tindol (818) 395-3631