This award from the Major Research Instrumentation Program (MRI) provides funds for the acquisition of a terascale advanced computing instrument at the Pennsylvania State University. The instrument will enable researchers from seven disciplines (biological, materials and social sciences, computer and information science, engineering, education, and geosciences), to perform virtual experiments toward discovery and design through computing. Research projects concern: predictive network modeling of infectious disease dynamics, designing new piezoelectric materials, designing next-generation chip multiprocessors, modeling human interactions to promote learning in virtual communities, and the development of a critical zone environmental observatory. Despite their diversity, these projects share computational scalability challenges to be addressed for enabling scientific advances that often depend on solving large problems representing a sufficient level of detail and complexity. The instrument will form the core of a multidisciplinary collaborative environment to enable transformative approaches to address the challenges of scaling at multiple levels. It will support a set of integrated research, education, training, and outreach activities to: (i) enable collaborative scaling across projects through the transfer of scaling approaches from one domain into another, while addressing algorithmic, system, or instrument scaling challenges within individual projects, (ii) promote technology-transfer through industrial partnerships, and (iii) grow and enhance the diversity of the limited computational science talent pool.
