By Jim Eaton
Matt Bellis, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics and astronomy, was awarded a hardware donation valued at $5,000 from NVIDIA Corporation, a leading manufacturer of graphics processing units. He received a Tesla K40, the latest processor released in November, that will allow students and faculty to conduct more research in less time.
“The hardware we received is what companies like Pixar and Disney are using to create animation movies,” Bellis said. “The only difference is, instead of creating a rendering, the scientific computing community is using the high speed processors for their analyses.”
The unit contains 2,800 processors on the card and will allow students like Alyssa Endres ’14 to get information back more quickly and can perform analyses more efficiently.
“Exposure to this type of technology as an undergraduate is awesome!” Endres said. “I’m just excited that we received this before I graduated.”
The K40 will be installed into a special computer designed to conduct scientific research. Bellis expects to have it up and running soon so Endres and her colleagues can use it when preparing for presentations at the American Physical Society Conference in Georgia this spring.
