Project Proposed: This project, acquiring instrumentation for a large-scale computing system, enables research in the physical, biological, and social sciences, as well as engineering, linguistics, statistics, and many other fields, under the umbrella of a High Performance Computing (HPC) Center. The instrumentation complements the Biomedical HPC center. Supported by the Information Technology Services (ITS), these centers are considered a single virtual unit. This work services 52 research projects from faculty in 22 departments including physical sciences, engineering, linguistics, mathematics, ecology, economics, psychology, statistics, and the biological sciences. The very diverse research covers a wide range of topics from cosmological simulations to climate modeling, to neural circuit networks and simulation of internal dynamics, to economic modeling, to name a few. The research is supported by more than 35 current and more than 20 pending projects. Research computational scientists assist with the instrumentation, teach parallel programming techniques, optimize current code, and write new codes to support individual projects. The diverse needs capable of handling both CPU and memory bound tasks along with substantial mass storage and communication infrastructure will most likely be covered by a large CPU cluster consisting of 350 nodes with 16GB of memory shared by 8 cores per node and a large memory cluster consisting of 28 nodes sharing 7,168 GB memory. This 10-fold more CPUs, increased memory, and mass storage are expected to be heavily utilized and have immediate impact in research and education.
Broader Impacts: The instrumentation leverages individual research of more than 350 faculty, research and postdoctoral staff, and graduate and undergraduate students. The latter will be able to train and learn how to optimally use such a facility. New courses will be developed for undergraduates focusing on HPC for nanoscale and biological systems. The institutional outreach program involves Howard and Xavier universities. Faculty from these universities will be trained via summer internships and allocated time in the HPC facilities.
