IBM Expands Latin American Grid Computing Initiative

IBM Expands Latin American Grid Computing Initiative

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Florida Atlantic University has become the tenth member of the IBM-led Latin American Grid (LA Grid), an effort to create professional IT opportunities for the Hispanic community and to advance research in areas such as life sciences, weather modeling and prediction. LA Grid, a collection of computing resources in North America, Latin America and Spain woven together to act as one massive supercomputer, has become one of the world’s largest university grid initiatives. LA Grid joins universities in several countries and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center to provide computational computing power to researchers and students, advance research initiatives for both the group and the individual university members and to foster greater collaboration on social research.

While joint research programs in hurricane mitigation, life sciences and healthcare are the priority for LA Grid, member universities can also access the joint supercomputing resources for independent research. FAU, for example, plans to conduct research on the human genome, bioinformatics mapping, computational physics, integrated computation and communications, video processing, computer simulation and information security.

“We are very excited to be a part of the LA Grid initiative and look forward to collaborating with IBM and our partners,” said Dr. Larry F. Lemanski, FAU’s vice president for research. “FAU was selected because of our advanced research, Hispanic technical professional talent, and executive commitment to fulfill the vision of LA Grid.”

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