A joint venture between Iowa State University, the U-S government’s Ames Lab is creating what’s being called Iowa’s most powerful computer. Chemistry professor Mark Gordon says I-B-M kicked in one million dollars worth of computer equipment to build the system. He says they’ve taken 128 computers and linked them together to build one large “cluster” of computers working together. Gordon says the process of linking computers together is called scalable computing. It allows each individual computer to work on seperate parts of a problem, and then share the information through their link.He says they’re are working on improving the software and hardware that allows the computers to speak to each other.Gordon hopes to use the computer to improve a program he helped develop that’s used in chemical research.
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