HU TO AID RESEARCHERS IN GLOBAL DATA GRID

Hampton, VA - The National Science Foundation recently announced that Hampton University will be among a consortium of 15 universities and four national laboratories in a $13.65 million bid to build the International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory (iVDGL).

This project will connect an international network of powerful computers at 40 locations in the United States, Europe and Asia. The grid will allow scientists worldwide to view and analyze the enormous amounts of data flowing from experiments in high-energy and nuclear physics, gravitational waves, astronomy and biology.

The iVDGL will link the resources of dozens of universities throughout the world into a single computational engine. The grid will have at its core thousands of computers with Intel Pentium processing units, at least one at each university or research center, each using the public, open-source Linux operating system and communicating with other grid members' ultra high-speed national and international networks.

"I am ecstatic," said Dr. Keith Baker, dean of the School of Science. "It's the wave of the future in high-performance and in compiling data."

The grid will be capable of handling quantities of data measured in petaflops, one petabyte is 1 million gigabytes, or roughly the amount of data contained in 100,000 personal computer hard drives. Eventually, the computational speed could be measured in petaflops, where one petaflop equals one thousand trillion calculations per second. The iVDGL will be powerful enough for hundreds of users worldwide to run jobs simultaneously, although a huge processing job may use the entire grid.

"We're on the ground floor, Hampton University will be a significant part of the foundation and we'll be able to help set the standard for this," Baker said.

Participating national laboratories are Fermi National Acclerator Laboratory, Brookhaven National Accelerator Laboratory, Argonne National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory.

The other schools that are a participating in the iVDGL are the University of Florida, the University of Chicago, California Institute of Technology, the University of California San Diego, Indiana University, Boston University, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and Madison, Pennsylvania State University, John Hopkins University, Northwestern University, the University of Southern California, Salish Kootenai and the University of Texas at Brownsville.

Hampton University is the only historically black institution involved in this project.

"We're consistently one of the stronger research groups in the country," Baker said. "Our excellence in research with ATLAS and Jefferson Laboratory has allowed us to participate in projects like the International Virtual Data Grid."

For more information, visit: www.ivdgl.org.

For additional information, please contact: Kia Dupree (757) 727 - 5255 or via email: kia.dupree@hamptonu.edu