BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — The National Science Foundation has awarded LSU's Center for Computation and Technology a $4 million grant to acquire a new supercomputer cluster capable of making one quadrillion calculations per second.

The Advocate reports (http://bit.ly/15oNF9a ) the NSF grant is the largest such award LSU has ever received as part of the Major Research Instrumentation program.

A supercomputer is generally defined as a large grouping of processors harnessed together and dedicated to working on complex, time-consuming set of problems.

This supercomputer will be used for a variety of research projects including the discovery of new drugs, modeling coastal processes and forecasting hurricane-generated waves and storm surges.

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