Oak Ridge National Laboratory

A partnership between Georgia Tech and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee positions the southeastern United States as a national destination for high-performance computing research.

The College of Computing, the laboratory and UT-Battelle, a nonprofit lab management company, agreed to share resources as they conduct large-scale research reliant on advanced supercomputing technology.

"Georgia Tech has one of the leading computer science departments in the nation and — recognizing that high-performance computing will enable breakthrough science in the 21st century — we started a new division in computational science and engineering to train the next generation of computational researchers," said Rich DeMillo, dean of the College of Computing.

"Oak Ridge National Laboratory has a long history of operating some of the most capable high-performance computers in the country," he said.

Tech's new 4,000-processor IBM eServer supercomputer — one of the fastest university computers — combined with Oak Ridge's facilities allows computational biology researchers to gather data from the sequencing of the human genome and apply it to the detection and prevention of diseases.

"College of Computing students will be able to study nanotechnology, computational biology, astrophysics, high-energy physics and chemistry with some of the best researchers in the world," DeMillo said. "This partnership represents one of the world's greatest resources for high-performance computing."