SIUE Awarded $395K NSF Grant for High Performance Computing Resources
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s high-performance computing resources will be enhanced for the benefit of computationally intensive research and education activities, thanks to a $395,580 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) through its Campus Cyberinfrastructure program.
SIUE Information Technology Services’ (ITS) Daniel Chace, deputy chief information officer and director of the Network and System Infrastructure group, is principal investigator of the project, entitled “CC* Compute: SIUE Campus Cluster.” SIUE’s Carolyn Butts-Wilmsmeyer, PhD, director of the Center for Predictive Analytics (C-PAN), is co-PI.
“We are excited for the research and educational opportunities this upgrade will bring to the SIUE campus,” Chace said. “A previous cyberinfrastructure project, also funded by the NSF, provided a 10x improvement to off-campus connectivity and a direct connection to Internet2. Our current project pairs those connectivity resources with high performance computing, enabling the campus community to pursue a variety of computationally intensive tasks from the comfort of their offices.”
“As the ability to collect and store data is becoming progressively easier, every discipline is becoming more data-driven,” Butts-Wilmsmeyer added. “There is a need for faculty to be able to access the computational resources they require for their research, and for our campus to train the next generation of computer scientists and data analysts using advanced computational power.”
This hardware enhancement will directly support ongoing projects on such topics as the use of machine learning models to predict complex phenotypic traits, understanding the mechanism behind the quantum phenomenon in chemical reactions, drug interactions and cybersecurity.
New servers are slated to arrive on campus this spring. Upon their arrival, Chace and the ITS Network and Infrastructure team will install them and work with faculty to set up the software and access needed to meet faculty research and student educational needs. Butts-Wilmsmeyer will serve as a training liaison between ITS and faculty to help faculty take optimal advantage of this resource.
Photo: SIUE Information Technology Services’ Daniel Chace, deputy chief information officer and director of the Network and System Infrastructure group.
