Following Hurricane Katrina, “It is difficult to describe how close to death Tulane University was and the city of New Orleans was,” explains Laura S. Levy, PhD, Vice President of Research, Tulane University. The Tulane and New Orleans communities were dedicated to bring the school back from the ashes.
Photo by Ryan Rivet.
Tulane partnered with Dell and Intel to create a new supercomputer that will help analyze big data in the research disciplines that need it most, especially those with applications in fields such as genomics, meteorology, remote sensing, molecular modeling, artificial intelligence, digital media, and robotics. Tulane calls the new supercomputing architecture Cypress.
Tulane now has one of the world’s fastest computers, after the school was ranked recently 271 of thetop 500 supercomputer sites worldwide.
The school released that Cypress will be used for for sea-level rise calculations, brain injury research studies and other complex, data-heavy projects that need hefty computational power.
Nicholas Altiero, dean of the Tulane School of Science and Engineering, says Cypress, “brings to us a whole new level of infrastructure that will make our current faculty members want to stay here, and it will also help us attract new faculty members.”
Cypress enables discovery with high-performance computing and big data analytics. The platform consists of Dell PowerEdge™ C8220X Servers and a Dell Networking Z9500 fabric switch, which will also help attract funding to Tulane.
“This system allows users to move seamlessly between big data analytics and traditional high-performance computing capabilities, enabling research,” said Charlie McMahon, vice president for information technology and chief technology officer. “We hope to demonstrate to the university that by using this supercomputing capability, our researchers are able to tackle bigger and more complex problems, to publish more papers and win more research grants.”
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