ANNA UNIVERSITY PARTNERS WITH SUN MICROSYTEMS

Anna University and Sun Microsystems have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) under which Sun will offer High Performance Computing (HPC) technology, while the University will supply its expertise and human capital.  Students and researchers will apply the power of sun-supplied resources to work on a variety of very large computational projects.  Sun will provide technical resources and training to support Anna University's requirements to promote the usage of HPC by industries and other collaborative partners.  The deployment of Sun hardware on campus includes Sun Fire Ultra SPARC III Enterprise server and a cluster of workgroup servers and Ultra SPARC workstations.  This partnership will allow researchers to take advantage of under-utilized systems resources, no matter where they reside on the campus.  It will enable them to accomplish their research and application development goals.

Speaking about High Performance Computing's growing importance, Bhaskar Pramanik, Managing Director, Sun Microsystems India said, "today we see desktop computers coming with speeds equal to that of main frames. The challenge is to harness these kinds of speeds and use it for research that would benefit science and society. High Performance Computing (HPC) has become an invaluable tool for commercial computing, particularly in the traditional domains of engineers, physicists, astronomers, chemists and other scientists. HPC is facilitating research in areas such as Computer Aided Molecular Design (CAMD), Computation Chemistry, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Polymer Science, Applied Parallel Computing, Econometrics, Psycology and Bio-informatics, Grid Computing, Natural Language Processing, Development of Finite Element code for CAD / CAM and so on. In fact the very first area that students and researchers are going to focus on through this partnership is Grid Computing".

Dr A Kalanidhi, Vice Chancellor, Anna University, said that the partnership was one of the steps towards the Anna University's objective of becoming the best technological university in the world. The resources he added would facilitate advance research.

Sun is a leading provider of industrial strength hardware, software services that power the Internet and allow companies worldwide to take their business to higher levels.  Sun can be found in more than 170 countries. Pramanik said that with this partnership, Sun was looking to combine the top minds in computing and Life Sciences with the industry's best technology, for processing and analysing vast amounts of data. With this alliance Sun continues to advance the HPC technology to help transform critical university research into future products and competitive advantages that will have enormous payoffs for students and researchers.

Anna University, the premier technical university with more than 206 years of experience in offering technical education with its vast expertise and world class infrastructure has established many advanced centres of excellence, where Research and Development and consultancy are of primary concern.

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