A new high-performance computer will allow the University of Central Florida to conduct realistic training scenarios with thousands of people training in the same virtual world and to conduct cutting-edge research in the physical and biological sciences.
[Reporter] It's a 2.6 million dollar package paid for with Army grants that will take that will take computing power and speed to a new level at UCF.
[Goldiez] We're always hamstrung by lab equipment. You're always, uh, restricted by the equipment you have available to you. So what this machine allows us to do is address much more complicated problems than we have been able to address previously. Someday this machine will be on your desktop so that the name of the game in the university environment is really two-fold. One, is to stay ahead of that curve and help influence that curve. And, two, is train our students to program these things.
[Reporter] The supercomputer will be used for military simulations and by UCF researchers in fields such as Math, Physics and Engineering. One of those researchers, an engineering professor whose lab develops tidal and storm surge models, is Scott Hagen.
[Hagen] There are multiple, larger scale clusters that are available nationally and even internationally that we may be able to get time on and they may be able to make the calculations extremely quick. However, you may wait a week before your calculations are done. And so, UCF having it's own cluster that has the potential to be in the order of magnitude more powerful than the one that I have in my lab and yet still has a limited number of users is a huge benefit.
[Reporter] The new super computer weighs 4 thousand pounds and can transfer 2 gigabytes of data per second. It can store the equivalent of 40 thousand music CDs or 500 thousand Encylopedia Britannicas. Additional hardware can triple that capacity by the end of the year. This is Chad Binette for UCF Reports.