Cornell announced today the endowment of a $50,000 fellowship, the IBM University Partnership Award, to support outstanding students of computer and computational science at Cornell. The fellowship, which will begin in Fall 1998, will be administered through the Cornell Theory Center (CTC).

"Throughout our long relationship with Cornell, the university has proven itself to be among the nation's leaders in high-performance computing," said Mark Bregman, the senior executive responsible for IBM's relationship with Cornell. "Our goal in establishing this fellowship is to provide an incentive for outstanding students to further their education in the high-performance computing arena -- whether in computer science, electrical engineering or computational science applications."

Bregman noted that IBM intends to establish close relationships with recipients of the fellowship by identifying mentors in research or product development to work with the students.

"We are developing the criteria under which students will be selected for the fellowship," said Malvin H. Kalos, who will head the selection committee. "We are honored by this recognition of Cornell's international leadership in computational science and the stimulus it provides to continue to bring outstanding students into the field."

The announcement of the student fellowship was made at a symposium honoring Kalos for his eight years of service as CTC director. Kalos is on sabbatic leave from Cornell and computer science professor Thomas F. Coleman has assumed leadership of the center.

CTC, which features a 160-processor RS/6000 SP, will provide the IBM student fellows with office space and access to the supercomputer for their research.

More than 600,000 RS/6000 systems are in use by over 100,000 commercial and technical customers around the world. The RS/6000 is IBM's family of computers that features the Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC)-based PowerPC chip and AIX, IBM's UNIX-based operating system. IBM's RS/6000 products range in size and capability from laptops, workstations, workshop and enterprise servers to the RS/6000 SP, the flagship supercomputer that challenged chess master Kasparov.

CTC is a high-performance computing center located at Cornell University. CTC is supported by the National Science Foundation, New York state, the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health, IBM and other members of the Corporate Partnership Program.