Old Dominion soon will acquire one of the 350 most powerful supercomputers in the world. It will be the only supercomputer at a Virginia higher education institution.

The university purchased the supercomputer, an HPC 10,000, from Sun Microsystems Inc. Old Dominion currently utilizes 3 percent of all of the supercomputer time in the United States, which is attributed to the computational work aerospace engineering faculty do with NASA.

The supercomputer will support the virtual reality cave that the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have funded for use by faculty and researchers at the university's Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography. It will also support graduate programs in simulation and modeling, as well as projects at the Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center, which focuses on the commercialization of developments at the Joint Training, Analysis and Simulation Center in Suffolk.

The supercomputer is an integral part of the university's proposed Engineering and Computational Sciences Building, which will focus on high-speed computing, modeling and simulation. The supercomputer will provide the core infrastructure necessary to support a new simulation and modeling industry in Virginia, according to President James V. Koch.

The university intends to make the supercomputer available to support Hampton Roads and Virginia firms and agencies that can make use of the high-speed, powerful computing in the workplace.