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A new partnership between IBM Corp. and an academic research organization is poised to dramatically boost the computing power available to research scientists at universities throughout the South.

IBM plans to announce today that it's working with 27 universities and colleges in 15 states — mainly in the South — to supply extremely powerful computers and integrate them into a giant regional computing grid that can be tapped by researchers needing extra computing power.

WHY A GRID?
The idea of grid computing, or stringing together computers to share computing power and storage and cut down on operating costs, is not new. While common in academia, grid computing also is widely used where researchers need to do highly complex computations, such as financial modeling or oil exploration.

The first schools to deploy new computers on the grid will be Georgia State University, Texas A&M University and Louisiana State University. Those three schools — all members of the Southeastern Universities Research Association, or SURA — have agreed to buy some of IBM's newest, most powerful servers.

Other members of the association participating in its high-speed optical network, called SURAgrid, include the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Florida, North Carolina State University and Kennesaw State University in Georgia.

"I look at this as kind of a cooperative," said Art Vandenberg, director of advanced campus services at Georgia State in Atlanta. "By banding together, we can create much, much more than we might do individually."

One of the initial ways researchers want to use the new computing power is to model and otherwise study the effects of coastal storm surges resulting from hurricanes — particularly apt research for much of the Southeast.

The idea of grid computing, or stringing together computers to share computing power and storage and cut down on operating costs, is not new. While common in academic settings, grid computing also is widely used wherever researchers need to do highly complex computations, such as financial modeling, genomics or even oil exploration.

SURAgrid is unique in its size and reach. It was initially created in 2003 to help its member schools share computing power. But until now, the grid has consisted mainly of whatever disparate computers the schools wanted to spare.

"So far it's been a little bit like stone soup," Vandenberg said. "People just contributed whatever resources they had available."

The addition of the IBM servers will give the network a major boost, essentially doubling the schools' collective computing power.

Ken King, vice president of grid computing for IBM, said the new, improved SURAgrid will be able to handle nearly 10 trillion calculations per second — an amount that would take one person with a calculator 8 million years to perform.

Compared to the computers most consumers are accustomed to, the new $600,000 IBM machine at Georgia State is massive. Housed in two tall racks, it comprises eight machines or "nodes" that each contain 16 processors. Together, the 128 processors can handle 1 trillion floating-point operations, those that involve decimals — or one "teraflop" — every second.

More important, Vandenberg said, is the fact that the Georgia State machine will be connected to the rest of the SURAgrid computers.

"I don't look at it as one teraflop" of computing power, he said. "I look at it as five or six or seven or eight or more teraflops interconnected."

While most computer users wouldn't have any need to harness that much computing power, many researchers do.

Traditionally, scientists who needed to do very complex, computer-intensive research might have had to book time and wait in line to use computers at one of the national supercomputing centers housed in universities across the country. Or worse, they might have to limit their studies to whatever computing power they could access otherwise.

Jerry Draayer, president and chief executive of SURA, said the addition of the computers to the SURAgrid network will help let researchers do their jobs without worrying about having enough computing horsepower.

"What we're attempting to do is let [researchers] think in ways where they're not constricted by databases, storage capacity" or computer power, he said.