NSF Grant to Bring New Computing Infrastructure to Campus

The National Science Foundation has granted Colgate University $500,000 to upgrade its high-performance computing cluster, accelerating research and undergraduate education in Colgate's STEM departments and beyond.

The new supercomputing system will significantly increase available CPUs - central processing units - of the existing system. But an even larger focus of the new infrastructure will be expanding the system's GPUs, or graphics processing units. These will allow for a broader suite of computer simulations, complex imaging processing, and other accelerated computing that CPUs alone would compute more slowly.

The award is the result of efforts from an interdisciplinary team of information technology staff and professors with computationally intensive research. Eleven additional faculty members also backed the grant.

"It is amazing that we have so many faculty that are doing research and so many of them that need computational support," says Niranjan Davray, Colgate University's chief information officer, who led the effort. "In support of the Third-Century Plan, we want to provide the best possible computing resources for them to be able to do their research here."

Of course, professors won't be the only ones to benefit. Students will, too. "We're doing cutting-edge, publishable research, but the people really doing it are undergraduate students," says Anthony Chianese, chemistry professor and co-lead on the grant.

Modern research efforts increasingly incorporate complex machine learning models and simulations or increasingly large datasets into their work - any of which benefit from, if not require, significant computing power.

Broadly speaking, an increase in computing power is like getting your first calculator when you've previously been doing all your arithmetic by hand. It makes complex calculations faster by multiple orders of magnitude, increases the accuracy of results, and opens the door for new levels of complexity.

Currently, when researchers want to use Colgate's supercomputer, they have to submit their jobs in the job queue. Some may even hold back the full extent of the research they'd like to do, so as to not hog the machines. Other alternatives have included submitting jobs to NSF Open Science Grid or NSF ACCESS programs or using cloud-based computing services, which have pay-per-use fee structures that can add barriers for student research and limit the feasibility of carefree experimentation.

"We're always limited by the amount of computing resources we have," explains Chianese. "We can't do all the calculations that we can imagine." More computing power means more calculations are possible, higher-level calculations are possible, and fewer compromises need to be made in accessing the shared resource.

Twenty-five percent of the new computing capacity will be dedicated to AI. On-campus servers protect the data of Colgate researchers and students, alleviating data-privacy concerns often associated with AI modeling. "You can experiment with it, and you don't have to share any of your data with the outside world," says Davray.

Another 20% will go toward the Open Science Grid. This partnership with the larger science community allows research institutions with high performance computing clusters to share a portion of their computing power with remote researchers. To date, this shared infrastructure from 92 institutions has contributed to 280 outside research projects. Colgate will make 93.

Davray says plans are in the works to engage the New York Six Liberal Arts Consortium as well as Madison County Public Schools. A type of remote network called a Science DMZ will allow partners to directly access Colgate's system, and hosted workshops will foster active learning partnerships.

The Colgate community can watch out for a survey coming their way soon about their actual and potential computing needs, says Kyriakos Tsoukalas, the associate director of research and high-performance computing, who will be managing the new computing resources. "We're casting a broad net so we can figure out what the community would like to see."

Overall, Colgate faculty are looking forward to what they'll be able to accomplish with the new infrastructure.

"Colgate really cares about making all of these resources accessible to us, so we can be successful in research, so that students can participate in cutting-edge research," says Grusha Prasad, assistant professor of computer science and co-lead on the grant. "It's a unique thing at a liberal arts college, but we are still a liberal arts college. And that to me is really cool."

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