This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The University of Alaska Fairbanks campus will install a research supercomputer that will be a broadly accessible instrument for investigation of phenomena related to the Arctic as well as a set of other key research areas. The instrument will be utilized by researchers from a number of domains, including geophysical science, mathematics, biology, supercomputing research, and engineering. The importance of the Arctic for understanding global climate change and its many influences is a driving force in bringing together these researchers, to address common interests from different angles, to share results widely through publications and presentations, and to integrate research and instrument use in the classroom. For the scientific areas, research will be both normative and transformative. Transformative results are part of the instrument design proposal, by providing a rich and useful resource for collaboration, not just for individual research projects.
Advances are envisioned in geophysical phenomena, including increased understanding of high-latitudes roles for climate change, the atmospheric sciences, the oceans, ice sheets, and sea ice. In biology and ecology, advances are envisioned in population genetics, marine ecosystems, and Boreal ecosystems. In the human sphere, advances are anticipated in human-ecosystem interaction and the influence on human infrastructure, on integration of datasets for native language study, and understanding of environmental influences on air and water quality. Engineering concerns, ranging from analysis of next-generation supercomputers to radio wave propagation, will see rapid progress.
This research equipment infrastructure enhancement will have broader impacts in a number of ways. As a minority serving institution in an EPSCoR state, UAF will leverage the instrument to provide opportunities for involvement of minorities and underrepresented groups in teaching, research and outreach. In addition, there is a significant community of researchers at UAF who utilize computational methods for discovery who will be enabled by this instrument.
" were to deploy and support computational and data-intensive resources in support of the broad range of science and engineering disciplines at the University of Alaska. Two supercomputers, and one data subsystem, were deployed over the course of the project. These were fully supported for all aspects of operation and use by personnel at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The first supercomputer, pacman, is a commodity cluster from Penguin Computing. The second computer, fish, is from Cray Inc., and features the addition of graphics processing units (GPUs) for computation. The data storage system, of nearly 300 terabytes (TB) of storage, was provided by Data Direct Networks (DDN). This project funded supercomputing and data facilities for the University of Alaska. The equipment has been utilized by students, faculty and staff from a wide number of disciplines, including oceanography, ecology, biology, chemistry, physics, information science, remote sensing, mathematics, engineering, atmospheric science, volcanology, and seismology. Scientists from these disciplines have utilized the equipment to simulate, analyze and better understand phenomena within their disciplines. Hundreds of students have utilized the equiment funded by this project. Undergraduates and graduates have engaged in coursework, independent research projects, and graduate theses and dissertations. Over the course of the 3-year project, dozens of scientific pubilcations have resulted from use of the major resources funded by this project. Hundreds of student projects have been completed. A number of scientific outreach activities have been engaged in, incluing NSF-funded Frontier Scientists at www.frontierscientists.com. These activities have yielded a broad base for scientific outreach, and for bringing scientific findings to diverse audiences.
