I suppose announcements of hardware acquisitions are becoming humdrum, unless you’re talking about BlueGene-level performance. But this story published today in the University of Oklahoma student daily caught my eye. First of all, the 6.5-teraflop Dell system they’re installing is being nicknamed “Topdawg,” and that’s just a cool name. And second, the system is being installed at the OU Supercomputing Center for Education and Research (OSCER). Notice that “education” comes first in that name, and in fact:

Henry Neeman, the director of Supercomputing for IT, said OSCER is the only university program of its kind in the world. The program teaches supercomputing to a wide range of people. A workshop called “Supercomputing in Plain English” teaches OU students about supercomputing through simple methods.

“We’ve focused on people who don’t know much about supercomputing,” Neeman said.

“Supercomputing in Plain English” — what a great idea!

(BTW, there is an error in the article regarding the production of the Top500 list, which is not, to my knowledge, compiled at NCSA. I’ve emailed the paper’s editor to suggest a correction. Maybe the confusion arose because NCSA’s computing environment includes a couple of Dell systems — Tungsten and T2).

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