Intel Funding For UT Will Develop Codes, Open Computing Center At Joint UT-ORNL Institute

Imagine going to the doctor and the doctor peering into your genetic code to determine the best medicine to treat what ails you.

The University of Tennessee in Knoxville has received funding from computer chip maker Intel to develop computer codes to make personalized medicine like this and other transformative scientific discoveries possible.

The funding will open an Intel Parallel Computing Center at the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, or JICS, at UT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Parallel computing, used in supercomputers, is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously. The focus of the center will be to take supercomputing to the next level to meet scientific computing demands. Today’s research faces limitations due to the amount of data, time, and energy it takes to run calculations.

The center will initially focus on two projects in computational biology that may lead to medical advances.