This project will the support the acquisition of a high-performance computing (HPC) and high-speed storage system at the University of Cincinnati (UC). This instrument will meet the computing needs of UC researchers and scientists spanning a broad range of fields including, physics, chemistry, aerospace & mechanical engineering, computer science, bioinformatics, medicine, and digital humanities. The research projects enabled by the HPC system in these areas will advance fundamental science and contribute to national priorities in health and national security. This system will also serve as a launching facility for the development of novel algorithms, and initial and scalability testing of codes, which will then be ported to national supercomputing facilities. Over 117 faculty and students will immediately benefit from this equipment. In addition to scientific advancements and development of the next generation of HPC-enabled workforce, this project will provide opportunities for the training of HPC administrators and facilitators. Through participation in the Open Science Grid, the equipment will also enable the research activities of external users. This project will involve the participation of underrepresented groups through summer internships, and workshops at local inner-city schools. Further, this project will offer the possibility of exposing researchers in humanities to the benefits of HPC through collaboration between the Advanced Research Computing and the Digital Scholarship Centers at UC.
The computing cluster will consist of Central Processing Units (CPU), Graphics Processing Units (GPU) and high-speed scratch storage to substantially enhance the capabilities of the Advanced Research Computing Center at UC and thereby support computational and data science researchers by providing HPC resources for large-scale scientific calculations, HTC for Monte Carlo type simulations, and GPUs for advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and visualization, all of which will enable sophisticated and increasingly realistic modeling, simulation and data analysis. These research efforts based on molecular dynamics and quantum chemistry simulations, computational fluid dynamics, multi-universe stochastic models, and data-intensive, deep learning and graph convolutional neural networks, will advance our knowledge of physical & cyber-physical systems, chemical and mechanical behaviors of materials, the structure and origin of our universe and contribute to the development of innovative applications such as brain-inspired computing, effective personalized precision medicine for complex diseases, carbon-neutral combustion devices, hypersonic propulsion systems, multi-UAV autonomous systems, and smart cities. These objectives closely align with one of UC’s enterprise-level programs, the Digital Futures initiative.
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.
