Yale is one of 13 universities nationwide that have been selected to receive major hardware grants in round two of the Intel Corporation's $90 million "Technology for Education 2000" program.
Over the next three years, a total of 25 universities will receive high-speed multimedia computers, workstations, servers, and hardware and software for computer networking. Intel's grant to Yale, which was based on a competitive proposal submitted in response to a solicitation from the computer corporation, is valued at $2.7 million.
Under the grant, Yale will receive 330 single- and multi-processor workstations and networking equipment, which will be used for advanced research and teaching in a broad array of disciplines, including astronomy, biomedical sciences, chemistry, com puter science, diagnostic radiology, engineering, physics and the arts. Approximately 125 workstations will be deployed in classrooms; 175 will be used for research, development, design and data acquisition; and 30 will be configured as a high-performance computing cluster.
Convergence of computation and communication. "The convergence of computation and communication is driving rapid economic development and revolutionizing the very foundations of society," says Martin H. Schultz, the A.K. Watson Professor and chair of computer science, and coprincipal investigator of the Intel grant to Yale. "In the U.S. and elsewhere, we face a growing shortage of well-trained personnel who can create and harvest the fruits of these technological innovations for the bettermen t of society. I salute the Intel Corporation for recognizing the need for the private sector to help carry the burden of financing both the training of people and basic research in academia, and for following up on its convictions in such a splendid fashi on."
The hardware provided under the Intel grant is expected to begin arriving on campus before the end of December. Microsoft is teaming with Intel to equip the computers with the latest versions of Microsoft software, development tools and support. Eac h machine donated by Intel will be configured with Windows NT* 4.0, Office 97 Professional Edition, and Visual Studio Enterprise Edition.
May revolutionize many disciplines. "Harnessing enormous amounts of computing in clusters of relatively inexpensive PCs promises to revolutionize many disciplines and in return stimulate challenging new computer science research problems," sa ys Professor Schultz. "This development builds on several innovative basic research projects conducted by Yale scientists and engineers over the past decade; the Intel grant finally gives us the opportunity to put theory into practical reality."
Projects and Yale faculty participating in the Intel grant program are drawn from across the University in four major academic areas: the physical sciences, the Digital Media Center for the Arts, computer science and engineering, and biomedical sciences. See OPA News Release #83 for a list of faculty participants.
Physical sciences. "In the chemistry department, we are developing and evaluating systems to do large-scale chemical computations, traditionally done on large mainframes or supercomputers," notes associate research scientist Julian Tirado-Riv es. "Our preliminary test results indicate that Intel hardware in clusters could provide a computationally competitive and more economical alternative to the larger computers."
Michael Zeller, the Henry Ford II Professor of Physics, one of the leaders of the Particle Physics Trigger Project, says: "Elementary particle physics experiments require searching through large volumes of data to find the rare events that reveal th e inner workings of the fundamental constituents of matter. The Intel grant will allow Yale physicists to significantly enhance this search process and to, in effect, find a particular needle in a haystack of 10,000 needles in a thousandth of a second."
The Intel hardware will also be used by scientists in the physics and astronomy departments for their work on the Quasar Equatorial Survey Team.
Digital Media Center for the Arts. The Digital Media Center for the Arts -- a new facility for cross-disciplinary discovery and creation in art, history of art, architecture, drama and music -- will have new digital "creation stations" to di gitize the treasures of the university's extensive art collections, and will create a digital design studio and a digital classroom.
Computer science and engineering. Yale also will create undergraduate computing and teaching labs, and provide hardware for the following computer science and engineering projects: "Investigation of Scalable Network and Platforms (SNAP) for E ngineering and Scientific Computing," "A Modular Tool Kit for Vision and Robotics," "The Center for Computational Vision and Control," "Fast Database Searching Using Off-the-Shelf Parallel Computers," "High-Level Programming for Vision and Mobile Computin g" and "Computational Modeling of Chemically Reacting Flows."
Biomedical sciences. In the biomedical sciences, the Intel grant will support integrative research and training in bioinformatics, and multimedia educational curricula stressing manipulable 3D models. In physics and astronomy, projects select ed for support include the Particle Physics Trigger Project, and the Quasar Equatorial Survey Team (QUEST), where 17 workstations will be deployed as data reduction stations at a mountaintop observatory in Venezuela.
Faculty representing the grant-supported projects will form a Project Advisory Committee. Overall management of the project is the responsibility of the University's Information Technology Services (ITS), headed by director Daniel Updegrove, who, wi th Professor Schultz, is co-principal investigator for the Intel project. Mr. Updegrove is also principal investigator of Yale's two-year grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation for High-Performance Connections for Collaborative Research, which wi ll provide access from the Yale campus network to the very High Speed Backbone Network (vBNS) that forms the core of Internet 2. It is anticipated that some of the Intel-funded projects will also benefit from access to the faster nationwide vBNS, says Mr. Updegrove.
The official Intel grant announcement can be found on the Internet at [http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/CO101697.HTM].