Indiana University has announced that it would replace its Big
Red supercomputer with the fastest university-owned
supercomputer in the nation. Named Big Red II, the new system
will be capable of operating at a peak rate of one petaFLOPS, or
one thousand trillion floating-point operations per second -- 25
times faster than the original Big Red first acquired in 2006.
The university plans to install the massive new system in its
state-of-the-art data center on the Bloomington campus in spring
2013. There is hardly an area of research these days that does
not use the enormous computational power and ability to process
huge amounts of data. In the life sciences it is used in areas
as diverse as brain modeling, computational genomics, molecular
modeling, drug design, bioinformatics and pandemic modeling,
while in the physical sciences and engineering they are used to
probe the fundamental limits of the universe -- from the very
small, such as in the search for the Higgs boson and beyond, and
at the largest scale,