ORU Professor Awarded for Work on Supercomputer

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Stephanie Hill, Director of University Relations & Communications
Office: 918.495.7337, Mobile: 918.720.5548
sthill@oru.edu

Tulsa, OK – Oklahoma’s Council on Information Technology (CoIT) has awarded Dr. Stephen Wheat the Certificate of Achievement for Private Institution Excellence for his exemplary work in bringing Titan to Oral Roberts University. CoIT announced the award today at its 2019 Oklahoma Higher Education IT Summit in Oklahoma City.

Titan, ORU’s new supercomputer, went online in October of last year. The $850,000 high-performance computing array consists of more than 1300 physical, high-performance computing cores and can perform 45 trillion calculations per second.

“Without Dr. Wheat’s connections in the industry, ORU and others in our community would not be benefiting from this supercomputer,” said Dr. Andrew Lang, Chair of ORU’s Computing and Mathematics Department. “We are grateful to have his expertise in building ORU’s computer science degree program which now provides access to Titan even for our undergraduate students.”

Dr. Wheat, an ORU alum, joined the faculty in January of 2018. Wheat is a highly experienced thinker who spent decades working in high-performance computing in a variety of areas ranging from industry, to academia to government consultations in the Departments of Defense and Energy.

“I’m grateful for the nomination and extremely pleased for the selection and the opportunity to represent what God is doing at ORU,” said Wheat. “All for His glory. I’m looking forward to even greater accomplishments in His service.”