National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure awarded $12 million to the Georgia Institute of Technology. The award is intended to lead a partnership of academic, industry and government experts in the development and deployment of an innovative and experimental high-performance computing (HPC) system. The award provides for the creation of two heterogeneous, HPC systems that will expand the range of research projects that scientists and engineers can tackle, including computational biology, combustion, materials science, and massive visual analytics. The project brings together leading expertise and technology resources from Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), University of Tennessee, National Institute for Computational Sciences, HP and NVIDIA.

NSF’s Track 2 program is an activity designed to fund the deployment and operation of several leading-edge computing systems operating at or near the petascale. An underlying goal is to advance U.S. computing capability in order to support computational scientists and engineers in the pursuit of scientific discovery. The award announced today is the part of the fourth round of awards in the Track 2 program.

The platforms will be developed and deployed in two phases, with initial system delivery planned for deployment in early 2010. This system’s innovations in performance and power will be achieved through heterogeneous processing based on widely-available NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs). As industry partners, HP and NVIDIA will be providing the computational systems, platforms and processors needed to develop the system. The initial system will pair hundreds of HP high-performance Intel processors with NVIDIA’s new next-generation CUDA architecture, codenamed Fermi, designed specifically for high-performance computing. This project will be the first of the Track 2 awards to realize the vast potential of GPUs for HPC.

“Research institutions are looking for energy-efficient, high-performance computing architectures that can speed time to solution. The combination of HP’s industry-standard HPC server technology with NVIDIA processors delivers increased performance and faster application development, accelerating higher education research projects,” says Ed Turkel, manager of business development in the Scalable Computing and Infrastructure business unit at HP.