Average Day Bandwidth Utilization –
OSHEAN Core
now be performed on campus while providing Rhode Island. “Combined, the supercomputer University of Rhode Island Graduate School of
a gateway to larger national resources through and the symposia allow us to begin to Oceanography, Tatiana Rynearson, who uses
the network. tackle our state’s most sobering challenges, technologies that collect so much genetic
thus allowing for economic growth and information that they had to develop a
stability through productivity, innovation computer program to analyze it.
• Sprint - 200 Mbps • Cogent - 600 Mbps The growing need for advanced computing
• WilTel/Level 3 - 200Mbps on campus is best highlighted by Jan S.
• Internet2 CPS (Commodity Hesthaven, professor of applied mathematics
Peering Service) - 400 Mbps and director of the Center for Computation
Total 1.4 Gigabits Per Second,
Average Day
— 2010
Supercomputer
Revolutionizes RI
University’s Center for Computation and
Visualization. Through a partnership with IBM,
Brown University obtained the supercomputer
not only to address the growing needs of its
own researchers, staff and students, but also
with the larger goal of beginning to tackle the
grand challenges affecting Rhode Island,
specifically in the areas of health, education,
energy and climate change.
Able to perform more than 19 trillion
supercomputer provides the advanced capacity
required for today’s sophisticated research.
Its vast processing ability will also eliminate
the need for researchers to outsource their
extensive datasets to offsite data farms.
Instead, these complex computations may
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Rynearson and her fellow scientists can gather
250 million bits of data in a day or two as they
Over the next few months, as Brown and IBM monitor changes in plankton in Narragansett
computer-enabled research cuts across all expand its collaboration with government, Bay. Now they collaborate with biostatisticians
research and opens entirely new pursuits and universities, hospitals, and businesses on at Brown University, and they share
innovations. However, this work demands best practices and outreach efforts, the information by renting space on commercial
greater computational capacity in terms of supercomputer will be put to additional use, fiber optic lines. One package of data was so
speed and the ability to handle large amounts first by researchers at the University of Rhode big it took more than a week to download.
of data. We now have a computing system that Island and the Marine Biological Laboratory in allows us to begin to address these timely Woods Hole, MA while Brown hopes to extend challenges.” its supercomputing services to other
organizations throughout the state.
Combined, the
supercomputer and the
symposia allow us to begin
to tackle our state’s most
sobering challenges, thus
allowing for economic
growth and stability
through productivity,
innovation and
competitiveness.
calculations per second and seventy-five times
faster than any other computer at Brown, this
vice president of research at Brown.
and Visualization. “We live in an era where
Rhode Island’s most powerful computing
system was just unveiled at Brown
and competitiveness,” said Clyde Briant,
– Clyde Briant
Vice President of Research at
Brown University
That’s why scientists at URI are looking
forward to completion of a $32.4-million
project to string 339 miles of fiber optic cable
among 50 schools and government offices in
every community in Rhode Island except
— 2011
New Fiber Optic
Network to Help Schools,
Government Offices
Master Volumes of Data
New Shoreham.
The project was announced in October by the
nonprofit OSHEAN, the Ocean State Higher
Education Economic Development and
Administrative Network. Early in 2011 it
plans to start spending $21.7 million in federal
stimulus funds and $10 million in private
NARRAGANSETT — Prof. Jennifer Specker contributions to string the wire.
holds up a transparency sheet and shows how While scientists at every school in the state
painstaking it used to be to sequence the genes will be beneficiaries, the new communications
of tiny organisms. Scientists such as herself capabilities will also be available to health
had to treat them radioactively, and then sit organizations, educators, law enforcement
with a ruler and draw lines connecting the The goals of the supercomputer extend beyond agencies, producers of traffic videos and
nucleotides. It might take a week to collect the university’s iron gates. To begin to address libraries, according to George Loftus,
20 to 100 bits of data. president and CEO of the nonprofit.
But no more. Many of the state’s schools are already
Specker points to her younger colleague at the interconnected with improved broadband
the needs of the state, together Brown and
IBM will host a “series of symposia” to define
and prioritize the “grand challenges” faced by
Stronger Together
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