Studying some of the most fundamental scientific problems requires the development of novel computational methods and their application to very large datasets. The computing facility is a significant addition to the current computing resources of the Computer Science program at Lawrence Technological University, and supports interdisciplinary computer science research in a fashion that allows to practically apply the computational methods developed at Lawrence Technological University to scientific questions in various disciplines such as Astronomy, Biology, Medical and clinical research, Scientific Computing, Biometrics, Remote sensing, Robotics, Fine Art, and more. The computing facility also allows involving more Computer Science undergraduate and graduate students in interdisciplinary Computer Science research. The ability of Computer Scientists to work in collaboration with other scientists in an interdisciplinary environment and understand problems in other disciplines is crucial for the development of the computational methods that can effectively solve problems in science and engineering. Therefore, interdisciplinary research experience provides undergraduate and graduate students with the training they need for effective real-life industry or academic research.
The purpose of the grant was to support a computing facility that will serve LTU computer science faculty and students for interdisciplinary computer science research. The grant supported workstations, storage device, and a computing cluster. The establishment of the computing facility was concluded successfully, and in fact the computing facility is significantly stronger than the one described in the proposal due to reduction in CPU prices, support from LTU, and an equipment grant from NVIDIA that provided substantial addition to the lab. In addition to the computing facility and computer lab, and despite the short period of the grant and the fact that the nature of the facility grant is primarily intended for future research, the grant already resulted in numerous peer-reviewed publications, multi-national collaborative research, and several discoveries that were discussed intensively in the world’s premier popular media. The computing facility that was established includes a 320-core cluster of AMD Operon processors. The proposal described a cluster with just 70 cores, but due to price reduction since the proposal was written a 320-core cluster was purchased for the same price. The CPUs are housed in five Dell PowerEdge R815 blade servers (64 cores per server), and placed in LTU server room. Each server has 128GB of memory and 2x300GB storage space for the operating system. The KVM that controls the servers was purchased by LTU. All servers were installed with 64-bit Scientific Linux. The storage device is a network storage device with 20 TB of RAIDed storage space. The machine is HP StorageWorks, with one four-core Xeon processor and 6GB of RAM. It runs Windows 2008R2 operating system. An important boost was from a grant kindly donated by NVIDIA Corporation, which enhanced the computer lab with three units of its state-of-the-art scientific GPUs – Tesla C2075. The GPUs will allow LTU to develop its scientific computing programs using GPUs and CUDA. Funding from LTU provided new furniture, painting, and installing power outlets that were needed for the workstations and for students to connect their laptops. Although the grant supported just purchasing of computing hardware for future use, and did not have a funded component of research activity, LTU students and faculty are already using the computing facility, and it clearly boosts the computer science program and significantly broadens the opportunities for science with big science and computing-intensive research. Namely, the lab already supported work done with the Zooniverse collaboration, where it led to new methodology to analyze galaxy images and the largest ever galaxy merger catalog is now being generated using the computing power of the new facility. Other notable discoveries that were made using the computing facility are the discovery that biometric identification of humans can be made using imaging of internal parts of the body, and the development and testing of the algorithm showing that computers can automatically analyze art in a fashion similar to art historians and critics. These two discoveries also attracted significant public attention, and were featured on the world’s premier international mass media such as NBC News (twice during the year of the grant), Yahoo News, International Business Times, Times of India (twice), Russia Today, Wired Magazine, The Huffington Post, The Daily Sun, The Daily Mail, and many more.
