Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences is awarded a grant to establish a centralized computational environment at its new Ocean Science and Education Campus in East Boothbay, Maine. Upon completion, this project will provide much needed computational infrastructure and enable Bigelow Laboratory to make a major transition to sustainable, cost-effective management of data and computational resources during the next decade. The new system will be comprised of hardware to provide expanded Parallel Processing Power, improved short-term Storage Capability, and Cloud Backup/Archival options for researchers at the institutional level, and MVC Framework Software for business operations in the National Center for Marine Algae and Microbiota (NCMA) at Bigelow Laboratory. The resulting computational environment will meet the current research needs of the Laboratory, and will allow for scalable expansion to meet future research needs.
Bigelow Laboratory supports several ongoing education initiatives that require computing resources to meet their objectives: the Keller BLOOM program for high school students, the NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, college-level courses taught by Bigelow Senior Research Scientists through an academic partnership with Colby College, the Professional Development Workshop for Science Teachers, and the Bigelow Postdoctoral Education Program. Each of these initiatives will greatly benefit from an enhanced computational environment since it is often difficult to procure adequate resources that provide students, educators and postdocs with the ability to analyze their data and continue to collaborate with Laboratory researchers beyond time spent at Bigelow. The environment resulting from this funding represents a significant computational expansion that will meet the growing needs of these educational initiatives and will provide Bigelow Laboratory with the ability to expand the educational scope of these programs and the freedom to develop future offerings centered on high performance computing. For more information about Bigelow Laboratory please visit the website at www.bigelow.org.
