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Archive for September, 2010

EPF Lausanne donates Blue Gene/L to university in São Paolo

Monday, September 6th, 2010

On a six-day visit to Brazil with focus on science and health issues, Swiss Interior Minister Didier Burkhalter officially hand over the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, donated by Lausanne´s Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), to Brazil´s education minister.

The supercomputer will be installed at the São Paulo University, Brazil’s largest university. The machine, which is the equivalent of a network of several thousand ordinary computers, is capable of performing 46 trillion operations per second.

The supercomputer will be installed at the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neuroscience, one of Brazil´s most innovative research institutes. The Blue Gene will be the first supercomputer in the southern hemisphere.

Link to Swissinfo: Burkhalter to hand over supercomputer in Brazil.
Link to the Western Swiss television channel TSR, Journal 19h30 (28 August) with a quotation of Patrick Aebischer: Le conseil federal Didier Burkhalter est en bresil pour developper la cooperation scientifique.

HP2C: Interdisciplinary look inside the Earth´s interior

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

(Cross posting from ETH Life)

The Swiss platform for High-Performance and High-Productivity Computing (HP2C) is the world´s first and only project with the aim of developing optimized scientific simulations for high-performance computers. Seismologists from ETH Zurich are also involved, namely in the «Petaquake» project.

What is the exact structure of the Earth´s interior? What are the processes that take place there? Where and how do earthquakes originate? These are some of the central questions concerning our planet that we have not yet been able to answer with certainty. A view into the Earth´s interior similar to computed tomography for a human being could provide these answers, thus helping to improve seismic risk maps. This would be an important basis for assessing the risk of the locations of nuclear power plants or hospitals in Switzerland for example.

Rread the full article on ETH Life »