This project, acquiring a high-performance computing (HPC) instrument, aims to service the needs of a small liberal arts college in research and undergraduate training. The instrument provides a powerful capability to 14 researchers and approximately 80 undergraduates, and will specifically impact computer science, biology, chemistry, economics, physics, and statistics, and enable bioinformatics, genomics, image analysis, matrix operations, and simulations. Saint Lawrence University has an active Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) grant where underrepresented students are recruited to work on projects with senior and junior faculty. The institution also has resources to recruit women and members of under-represented minorities through S-STEM, Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP), McNair Scholars, and Collegiate Science and Technology Entry Program (CSTEP) initiatives. Aided by the instrumentation, seminars will be offered on the R statistical software package, and junior faculty will be mentored in HPC.
The instrumentation will be used in cross disciplinary and interdisciplinary activities, including servicing and sharing with other universities (such as Clarkson) for large scale parallelization. The cluster enables a new Data Science major that will have access to run its experiments.
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.
