Xserves to Power Florida A&M Research Project

Florida A&M University will be using a 128-node Xserve G5 cluster as part of a research project for the US Army. The project, awarded by the Army Space and Missile Defense Command, will develop tools and techniques using lasers to remotely detect hazardous materials. The cluster was provided by Small Tree Communications, and will be located at the Universityis new Center of Plasma Science and Technology.

Dr. Lewis Johnson, assistant professor of physics at Florida A&M, commented "The calculations we need to generate for this project involve a lot of matrix manipulations and the vector processors on the G5 are excellent for these types of calculations."

Florida A&M based their decision on the success of the Terascale Computing Facility at Virginia Tech University, which also runs on Xserve G5 systems. Virginia Techis facility, however, is nearly ten times what Florida A&Mis;system will be, weighing in with 1,100 Xserve G5s.