IUPUI Cells Out
Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) will be the site of IBM's first university-based Cell technology development facility--the Future Technology Solution Design Center. The 2,000-square-foot facility will be housed in IUPUI's Informatics and Communications Technology Complex and staffed by five IBM developers who will explore "new products and applications based on advanced Cell processor technology."
Robert Eades will serve as manager of the center. "We chose Indiana for this center because of the close proximity of leading institutions like IU, IU School of Medicine and Purdue, as well as its well earned reputation as a hot bed of life sciences expertise," he said in a statement released by the university Sept. 27. "We believe we can couple this expertise with the advanced capabilities of our Cell technology to benefit not only medicine, but a broad range of industries and applications."
"To advance computing we are going to have to be more creative about how we use parallel programming," said Gerry McCartney, vice president for information technology and chief information officer at Purdue University in a prepared statement. "By placing the Future Technology Solution Design Center along Indiana's I-65 research corridor, IBM will be able to work with scientists and engineers from Purdue, IUPUI, and IU-Bloomington to optimize their research so that it will run on the next generation of supercomputers."
Brad Wheeler, IU's vice president of information technology and chief information officer, spoke on camera about the new facility. (QuickTime or other MP4-compatible player required to view video below.)
IBM is investing about $3.8 million in the facility, which, according to the university, includes "equipment and staffing costs, with lab space and datacenter support leased from the university." The center will be accessible by both academic and business customers for designing and testing devices based around IBM's Cell technology.
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