NDSU's new Center for High Performance Computing is gearing up to meet the emerging needs of university researchers and area businesses. Located at the NDSU Research and Technology Park, the center's technology puts amazing power in the hands of the user.

During the next five years, the center plans to develop a network of several hundred desktop computers linked through parallel programming. Complex problems can be broken down to smaller elements, and results are much, much faster. Computations that once took weeks will take only minutes or seconds.

"Our three goals for the center are to support university scientists and researchers, create partnerships with the federal government and support private sector partnerships," explained Bonnie Neas, assistant vice president for federal government relations/Internet research. "I'm hoping that a year from now, we will have a system set up that the private sector will be able to use."

There are high hopes for the center, which university researchers will begin using this fall. Work with government entities is planned during the coming year, followed by making the center available to industry researchers.

"Supercomputing centers are really vital to scientific and engineering research throughout the country and around the world," said Greg Lund, communication director for the San Diego Supercomputer Center. A research unit of the University of California-San Diego, the center has a staff of more than 400 scientists, software developers and support personnel. The center is a leading-edge site for the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, a 41-institution partnership funded by the National Science Foundation.

"Many industries—the biotechnology industry, for one—might make use of supercomputing. They'd be eager to get more supercomputing time as it becomes available," Lund said, noting that business collaborations may look to NDSU's center because of the university's expertise in mining technological data.

"Certainly there is a great benefit that can be derived from a close cooperation between science and industry," Lund said.

Companies are expected to use the NDSU center for everything from processing information to data access or storage, either in conjunction with university scientists or by themselves. "It could be used as a chargeable service by the private sector. It could be used by companies that need advanced computing capabilities for their own research and development, but don't want to invest initially in the capital expense to build their own computer center," Neas said.

Some of the many services the center will provide researchers are modeling, simulation and visualization tools for areas such as road and bridge construction, robotics for the health care industry and microsensors for industrial and military sectors. It will feature software development for data mining applications and support NDSU's nanotechnology, corrosion and microsensing projects. In addition, center users can design integrated circuits of any size, conduct research on the identification and control of potentially dangerous microorganisms and simulate complicated virtual environments.