The University of Michigan has a long history of collaborative computational resources supporting research and education. Such resources include high-performance computaitonal clusters, data storage and archival systems, and visualization resources. This project improves connectivity between these systems internally and between these systems and the University's collaborators in the US and around the globe. Resources with improved connectivity include Nyx, a shared-tenancy high performance cluster; Flux, a University-wide shared compute cluster; and the UM 3D Visulation Lab, an interdisciplinary service facility used in part for visual exploration of large scientific data sets.
This project's support of improved network connectivity between these assets and the broader Internet supports a broad swath of computationally-enabled scientific explorations, including the following examples. Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences faculty at Michigan are using Flux and the UM3D lab to explore climate change. Chemical Engineering faculty at Michgian are using Nyx and the UM3D Lab to develop "designer structures" at the molecular level. Physics faculty at Michigan and elsewhere will be better able to explore cosmological impacts of dark matter, as well as delve into the fundamental partical physics with data from the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. In addition to these fundamental scientific advances, the infrastructure improvements also play a role in the training of undergraduate and graduate students across the University and beyond, through distance learning efforts, in fields from planetary weather through computational science as a discipline unto itself.
