High performance computing centers now serve a broad set of user interests with researchers from all disciplines now leveraging computation and/or big data in interesting and novel ways. This change is not confined to top tier universities, but rather impacts researchers at all institutions of higher learning. In short, the need to support researchers who span all academic areas and require a diverse set of cyberinfrastructure (CI) has become a key challenge for research centers and IT organizations nationally. Today, scientific discovery is enabled through compute-intensive and data-intensive research that would not be possible without advanced CI. This project forms a collaborative, state-wide support team, the Kentucky Research Computing team (KyRC), that provides researchers with direct access to expert CI engineers to assist in applying, consulting, and supporting a wide-range of computational systems and research disciplines.
The goal of KyRC is to serve a broad range of institutions across the state of Kentucky in higher education, smart cities, and community education and training efforts. KyRC provides support to a variety of emerging research areas in need of CI support that heretofore were not part of the computational community. In addition to state-wide support, KyRC collaborates with leading regional and national CI entities to facilitate a community of expertise. By providing access, education, and exposure to advanced CI, KyRC enables research programs to recruit more students (e.g., groups underrepresented in STEM) to computational research while enhancing the training of undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs in Kentucky higher education.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
