Campus Talk: UA Acquires New Supercomputer For Research Support

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UA ACQUIRES NEW SUPERCOMPUTER FOR RESEARCH SUPPORT
The National Science Foundation and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, have agreed to transfer ownership of the computer cluster known as “Trestles” to the University of Arkansas High Performance Computing Center. Once installed, the new supercomputer will more than double the center’s computational capacity and allow it to run three times the amount of jobs for campus researchers, said David Chaffin and Jeff Pummill, interim co-directors of the center.

The Arkansas High Performance Computing Center, founded in 2008, supports research for about 260 users in about 30 academic areas across the campus, including bioinformatics, physics, integrated nanoscience, computational chemistry, computational biomagnetics, materials science and spatial science, among others.

“Trestles will provide much-needed infrastructure for solving tasks such as genome assembly and other data-intensive problems,” Pummill said.

Trestles has 256 servers, 16.4 terabytes of memory and a processing speed of 79 teraflops. A teraflop is the measurement of 1 trillion calculations per second. Whereas a typical desktop computer has four processing cores, Trestles has 8,192.

JUDGES NAMED TO UA DISTANCE EDUCATION POST
Donald P. Judges has been named the interim associate vice provost for distance education at the University of Arkansas, taking on the role of second-in-command at the Global Campus beginning May 1. Judges, now associate dean of graduate programs and experiential learning at the School of Law, will spend half of his time working with the Global Campus leadership team and the other half teaching courses as the law school’s E.J. Ball Professor of Law.

ARKANSAS BAPTIST’S SCOTT FORD CENTER TO HELP INMATES TRANSITION BACK TO SOCIETY
Arkansas Community Corrections inmates are transitioning into society at Arkansas Baptist College in a facility named for former Alltel President Scott Ford. The Scott Ford Center for Entrepreneurship & Community Development was dedicated Wednesday. Ford donated $2.5 million to the Little Rock-based historically black college to build a men’s dormitory, initially requesting that the gift be anonymous, said ABC’s president, Dr. Fitz Hill. Hill said he asked Ford’s permission to publicize the gift to be a catalyst to attract more community support.

SCHOOL BROADBAND PROJECTS AWARDED
Projects have been awarded to 22 telecommunications providers to improve the Arkansas Public School Computer Network (APSCN), which is the state’s broadband network for public schools. The Arkansas Department of Information Systems (DIS) and the Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) announced last week that all bids have been awarded for the improved network, which will ensure school districts will receive at least 100 kilobits per second per user. The access will be funded by ADE using the department’s existing $13 million broadband budget.

FCC WAIVER COULD NET STATE MILLIONS FOR SCHOOL BROADBAND
The state could receive millions of dollars to pay for broadband access to schools from federal E-rate funding that had been withheld over a three-year period, the Arkansas Department of Information Systems announced Friday. The state is waiting on the federal government to tell it how much E-rate funding it will receive.

The money would be coming thanks to a waiver request granted to DIS by the Federal Communications Commission, which had suspended funding to the department for program years 2012-14 because of a rule requiring applicants to have a signed contract in place before applying for E-rate support.