Convergent Technology

Austin would not have the established reputation as a leading technology center without the presence of the University of Texas at Austin. As a world-class research institution, the University of Texas at Austin has annual research expenditures of more than $600 million and over 800 patents awarded. UT Austin's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department has ranked as one of the top 10 in the country for more than a decade, while the University ranks in the top 10 nationally for the number of science and engineering doctoral degrees. Also ranked in the top 10 is the Department of Computer Science which is just breaking ground on a new $97 million dollar facility named the Bill and Melinda Gates Computer Science Complex. UT Austin is home to more than 150 organized research units, including the Microelectronics Research Center, the Center for Nano- and Molecular Science and Technology, the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Wireless Networking and Communications Group., The impact of the university's research ripples through Austin, Texas and around the world.

Researchers and industry partners also have access to the world's biggest computer resource. Housed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT, the world's largest supercomputer, dubbed "Ranger" went online in January 2008, weighing in with 62,976 CPU cores, 125 terabytes of memory, 1.7 petabytes of disk space, and 504 teraflops of performance. Developed in partnership with Sun and AMD, the system cost $30 million in hardware alone and was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The system was six or seven times larger than any of the existing systems researchers have access to at that time. In addition to leading academic research in various disciplines, technology companies from the large to the small are able apply for time on the supercomputer to extend their own research abilities.