OLD DOMINION UNVEILS SUPERCOMPUTER, THE BIGGEST ON ANY VIRGINIA CAMPUS

Old Dominion University yesterday unveiled the HPC 10,000, one of the 350 most powerful supercomputers in the world and the biggest on any campus in Virginia, during a news conference and demonstration of the machine's capabilities.

President James V. Koch, Oktay Baysal, eminent scholar of aerospace engineering, and Alex Pothen, associate professor of computer science, explained how the computer, which is capable of performing 20 billion calculations a second, supports faculty research and how it will benefit area industry.

Old Dominion currently utilizes 3 percent of all of the supercomputer time in the United States, which is attributed to its computational work with NASA. The supercomputer will also support the university's virtual reality CAVE that the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have funded, graduate programs in simulations and modeling, and Old Dominion's Virginia Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation Center, which focuses on the commercialization of developments at the Joint Training, Analysis and Simulation Center in Suffolk.

It will also be an integral part of the university's proposed new Engineering and Computational Sciences Building that 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.

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

Old Dominion purchased the supercomputer from Sun Microsystems Inc., which donated $800,000 to help pay for the $1.5 million machine. Sun sales manager Alan Morris said yesterday of Old Dominion, "This is the 'University of Can Do.'"