CC* Compute: GROWTH - Gateway for Increased Research Output at a West Texas Higher-education Campus

West Texas A&M University

Investigators

Abstract

West Texas A & M University (WTAMU) is expanding its computing resources to meet the rapidly growing needs of faculty, researchers, and students across four colleges on its campus. The university’s current objective is to attain doctoral status and become a Regional Research University to solve the complex and demanding problems associated with the Texas Panhandle region. This project is aimed at tackling the leading issues affecting the region: water and energy. The computing cluster enables scientific and engineering high performance computing (HPC) and data-intensive artificial intelligence (AI). These are key paradigms that are spearheading multiple science drivers across campus in water management, wind energy harvesting and energy storage. This program broadens and fortifies educational opportunities for a regional Hispanic Serving Institution with a recently established engineering graduate program, contributing to the development of an HPC & AI literate workforce. This cluster strongly impacts research and education communities associated with WTAMU, community colleges and industries in the Panhandle region, and Texas A&M Agrilife Research station in Amarillo. In addition to providing local computing resources, this cluster contributes towards the Open Science Grid, which provides high throughput computing resources across the nation. The compute cluster is equipped with 1024 compute CPU cores and 10240 GPU cores to enable massively parallel HPC workflows in computational fluid dynamics, computational materials science computational mechanics, machine learning and data visualization. It complements on campus materials characterization techniques via a computational-empirical interface and engages undergraduate and graduate students in high performance computing and big data applications. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.