Southern Illinois University Carbondale is one of just 16 institutions in the U.S. to possess a high-speed, supercomputer.
SIU Information Technology's Big Dog High Performance Computing Cluster went online in October 2015, and underwent several weeks of testing and development. Now, it's ready for more researchers to use it and push its limits.
Research coordinator Chet Langin oversees the supercomputer at SIU-C. He says it will help researchers compute their data much, much faster.
"What BigDog does is it takes those kinds of problems that might take seven days on a desktop or in a lab, and reduces it by rule of thumb typically to about seven hours. From seven days to seven hours on the high performance cluster."
Langin says Big Dog will enhance grant proposals.
"Faculty have been reaching out to me for letters of support. I have written letters of support, which I have returned to the professors and they attach that to their grant proposals, which they send off to the NSF or other funding agency, saying that if the grant is funded SIU will support the grant by providing this BigDog Supercomputer free of charge to this professor."
The SIU-C Office of Information and Technology will offer faculty and students instruction on how to access and use Big Dog.
Langin will lead sessions January 24, 25 at 10 a.m., and again on Jan. 31 at 1:30 p.m. in Morris Library.
To register, visit http://oit.siu/edu/rcc/services/general-request.php.