MRI: Acquisition of a Shared High Performance Computational (HPC) Cluster for Research, Training and Institutional Use

University Of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg MS

Investigators

Abstract

The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) will acquire a supercomputer to support research and training in computational and data-enabled science and engineering (CDS&E) in a variety of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. With this supercomputer, computational resources will be made available to students, staff, and faculty at both USM and regional community colleges and high schools, thereby providing enhanced capabilities for training and education. This instrumentation will also include an institutional repository for archiving data sets and scholarly output, and disseminating these resources to the scientific community and to the public. This instrumentation will establish critical cyberinfrastructure needed to facilitate student learning and research in four main thrusts whose common denominator is computing: (i) Materials Science, (ii) Biological Sciences, (iii) Coastal and Marine Sciences, and (iv) Data Mining, Bioinformatics, and Geoinformatics. The instrumentation will comprise standard compute nodes, high-core compute nodes, large memory nodes, and nodes equipped with graphics processing units (GPUs). The instrumentation will enable academicians, researchers, and students to pursue research and education in areas of national and international importance, such as climate change, coastal hazard mitigation and resilience building efforts, advanced manufacturing, natural resource management, the materials genome initiative, and big data science. The instrumentation will reduce researchers' reliance on external cyberinfrastructure, and will aid their transition to national user facilities such as the NSF's eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE).