STONY BROOK, N.Y.— Stony Brook University has received a Shared University Research (SUR) award from IBM, as part of the company's nationwide initiative to foster collaborative research. The gift consists of a pSeries supercomputer capable of nearly a trillion floating-point operations per second and a visualization engine, which will be used to support Stony Brook and Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) research in parallel computing, structural biology, nanomaterials, bioinformatics studies. The hardware system will be housed at BNL.

The pSeries computer will dramatically advance many computational science projects that Stony Brook and Brookhaven researchers are conducting. These projects, all requiring massive computing resources, include structural analysis of biotoxins through molecular dynamics simulation, design of ultra-high density storage devices, study of supernova explosions, modeling of a new generation of high energy accelerators, and microarray data analysis.

Additionally, more than 300 graduate students in computational sciences will benefit from the IBM platform.

“This generous gift is for the entire Stony Brook campus community, the students, the faculty, and other teaching staff,” said Yuefan Deng, Ph.D, Stony Brook professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. “It will enhance the ability of researchers to calculate more quickly and efficiently information that is integral to research in the 21st Century.”

Professor Deng accepted the award with James Glimm, Ph.D, Chair of Stony Brook's Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and Arie Kaufman, Ph.D, Chair of Stony Brook's Computer Science Department, and James Davenport, Ph.D, Director of the Computational Science Center at Brookhaven Lab and Carl Anderson, Ph.D, Chair of the Biology Department at Brookhaven.

“I am thrilled with this award,” said Yacov Shamash, Stony Brook's Vice President/Economic Development and Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “IBM was one of the first companies to support the establishment of the Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology on campus, and this award is a strong indication of the close research interactions between our organizations.”

“I am delighted that this grant is being made by IBM to support the scientific and computational enterprise at Stony Brook University,” said Gail Habicht, Stony Brook's Vice President/Research. “The Office of the Vice President for Research is providing an additional investment in this initiative because the equipment and software being made available by IBM will be immensely useful to faculty and students from all sectors of the University.”

The IBM SUR program is designed to promote collaborative research projects and to increase access to, and successful use of, IBM technologies for research and curriculum. IBM has made more than $70 million in SUR grants over the last three years in projects ranging from exploration of on-demand supply chains to an effort to find biomarkers for organ transplants.

The SUR awards also support the advancement of university projects by connecting top researchers in academia with IBM researchers, representatives from product development, and solution provider communities. IBM supports more than 50 SUR awards each year worldwide, including about 10 each year in the U.S.

About IBM
IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. IBM works with companies of all sizes around the world to deploy a full range of IBM technologies. For more information about IBM, visit www.ibm.com.

About Stony Brook University
Stony Brook University is one of the nation's leading public research universities, with over 21,000 students from more than 50 countries. Honors presented to Stony Brook faculty include the Nobel Prize, Crafoord Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and Fields Medal, in addition to many other awards. A member of the Association of American Universities, Stony Brook co-manages Brookhaven National Laboratory, joining Princeton, Cornell, the University of Chicago, Stanford, and the University of California-Berkeley as the only institutions in the country involved in a research collaboration with a national laboratory. For more information, visit www.stonybrook.edu.

About Brookhaven National Laboratory
One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE's Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization. Visit Brookhaven Lab's electronic newsroom for links, news archives, graphics, and more: http://www.bnl.gov/newsroom.