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Harnessing advanced computer power for public health and safety applications is the aim of a new technology center at the University of California, Davis, established in collaboration with Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun is providing servers, computer network switches and software to the university at a steep discount over normal academic pricing, through its "Sun Centers of Excellence" program.

"The new center greatly enhances our capabilities for performing state-of-the-art computational studies impacting research in many different disciplines. 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ Davis is very fortunate to have Sun Microsystems as a partner in harnessing information technology to tackle society's most pressing needs," said Barry Klein, vice chancellor for research at 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ Davis.

The new center will establish a distributed, or "grid," computing environment at 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ Davis. Grid computing allows researchers to access and share the resources of many different computers, servers, databases and information stores regardless of their physical location. The campus already has a number of "cluster" computing systems, where numbers of identical computers are wired together to function as a single powerful computer. Grid computing will allow these clusters to work together.

"University researchers can benefit substantially from having access to such a distributed computing infrastructure," said Bernd Hamann, professor of computer science and associate vice chancellor for research at 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ Davis.

The center will provide additional computer power and resources for several existing research centers that rely on high-performance computing. They include the Computational Science and Engineering Center; the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interests of Society (CITRIS); the Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization; and the Genome Center.

Research that will benefit from the center includes: developing computational models to predict earthquakes; using distributed networks of environmental sensors to address problems such as transportation, natural disasters and climate change; creating "virtual reality" environments and powerful data analysis technology that allows scientists to interpret their data; and studies in genomics and bioinformatics.

The computing grid created by the center will allow researchers in these groups to easily access and use each others' resources, Hamann said.