While many Alienware owners would call their computers "super," the game PC manufacturer is beginning construction on a true supercomputer. The company is partnering with Florida International University for the construction of a powerful distributed-memory parallel computer for the school's college of engineering.
As part of FIU's Computational Science and Engineering initiative, the Alienware supercomputer will be used for a variety of research, including protein folding, advanced materials, biomedicine, and hurricane simulation and tracking. The parallel computer will be located in the Multi-disciplinary Analysis, Inverse Design, Robust Optimization and Control (MAIDROC) Laboratory at FIU, and it will employ a battery of Seagate hard drives and 98 AMD Opteron processors.