The University of South Dakota (USD) will acquire, deploy, and maintain a cluster supercomputer to be named after Nobel Laureate and USD alumnus E. O. Lawrence. As a campus-wide resource available to all USD faculty, staff, postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates as well as researchers across South Dakota, the Lawrence Cluster's key objectives are to 1) Accelerate scientific progress and reduce time to discovery, 2) Enable and accelerate scientific results not previously possible, and 3) Increase student engagement in computationally assisted research.
Initially, the Lawrence Cluster will support 12 STEM projects across 7 departments at 3 institutions in North and South Dakota, including 21 faculty, 26 postdocs, and 307 students. The system will support multidisciplinary research and research training in scientific domains such as high energy physics, the human brain, renewable energy, and materials science. It will help answer questions of considerable public interest and societal value, including the nature of dark matter, and the elusive links between the human brain and human behavior. Moreover, advances in both optical properties of nanomaterials and in design of organic functional materials are relevant to a broad range of material science and engineering problems. Results will help lay the foundation for the efficient fabrication of novel materials.
The Lawrence Cluster will have a peak theoretical performance of more than 60 TFLOPS. The system architecture includes an XSEDE-compatible software stack, general-purpose compute nodes, large memory nodes, GPU-accelerated nodes, interactive visualization nodes, a high speed InfiniBand interconnect, and a high-capacity parallel filesystem. In additional to a traditional command line interface, the Lawrence Cluster will also include a browser-based user portal for job submission and management.
