This proposal is for the acquisition of a Particle Physics Computing Facility (PPCF) to support research in particle and nuclear physics at Hampton University, an HBCU and a predominantly undergraduate institution. The research will be with ATLAS at the CERN LHC, MINERvA at Fermilab, and Jefferson Lab. This facility will make available on-campus facilities enhanced in performance by more than an order of magnitude over the Hampton researchers' current facilities, as measured by throughput, data storage capacity, and ability to support interactive users. An important aspect will be its use for research training and integrated research/education activities at Hampton University. The proposed PPCF will consist of a cluster of about 20 compute nodes, 10-20TB of storage, with interactive access. Ten percent of resources will be set aside for other activities, including work by other researchers on NSF-supported topics, to familiarize others on campus with this type of computing, and to foster development of campus resources. In addition to its use in support of physics research, the PPCF will be utilized for activities in cyberscience including: Studies of cluster and 'local grid' computing issues (security, monitoring, etc.); Short courses on programming and scripting languages, the Linux operating system, and physics applications; and workshops or seminars on cluster and grid computing.
