U Of L Supercomputer Starts Up

A new supercomputer has been installed on the University of Louisville campus.The supercomputer is capable of 25 thousand calculations per second, which is roughly the same computing power as 75 hundred household PCs.U of L Vice President of Information Technology Priscilla Hancock says it will be used for research by every department."Watch what rolls out of it. And you won't even probably know it's the machine that did it," she says. "You'll just see vitalized and revitalized research – research that wasn't possible until this machine was here."One of the first commands given to the computer will be to compare the attributes of diabetes patients, in search of genetic predispositions or other reasons why the patients developed the disease."There may be correlations between various attributes of different types of people that may lead to diabetes and they start saying, 'Well we didn't see that before,'" she says.The $2.1 million dollar system was paid for largely with federal funds.