This MRI award provides funds to support the acquisition of a high performance computing system at Texas Southern University, a Historically Black University. This acquisition will enable TSU faculty to pursue cutting edge research in the areas of computational material science, nano-science, quantum chemistry, electronic structure theory, strongly correlated plasma simulations, and the further development of robust tools and methods for parallel processing and distributed computing. This resource will be used directly in the research of faculty members from Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Biology and Computer Science. The computing system will also serve as a platform for promoting interdisciplinary collaboration across the campus and for opening new areas of research and research training.
The PI started the TSU-HPC in 2008 because there was zero institutional computing at Texas Southern University (TSU). The PI realized that this situation had to change and real institutional computing had to be initiated. That is what was done.Th PI and his co-PI’s started with one eight-core server. From this we leveraged some money from the Welch Foundation (20K) and were able to expand the system up to 8 servers with a gigabit interconnect. This allowed us to leverage some Title-3 money from Texas Southern University (80K) and expand the system up to 24 servers. Through all this we where using the system to do research and enhance the computational science education at TSU. Then in 2011 we where successful in leveraging 220K from NSF. This allowed us to expand the existing resources, double what we proposed in the original write-up, to obtain a ~1000 core machine. This has significantly enhanced TSU’d research profile in Computational Science and further allowed the PI and co-PI’s to leverage even more money from the ARO-DoD, a 623K grant where 200K is strictly dedicated to building the next generation supercomputer, a sixteen server "Phi" machine which will have a total 32 Intel Phi co-processor cards connect by a very low latency 56G Infina-band inerconnect, top speed about 32 TF. So far, and the number per year is climbing, about 10 publications can be attributed to this center, as well as numerous student activities and STEM outreach as well as this year two conferences/workshops where attendance was around 30 individuals. The PI would like to state for the record, that this type of infrastructure investment from NSF, with the right group of researchers supporting it, can be very transformative of these types of institutions. Onward and Upward!
