Demonstrating the Impact of High Performance Computing to Academic Competiveness

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Demonstrating the Impact of High Performance Computing to Academic CompetitivenessComputational simulation and analysis are essential to business competitiveness, engineering design, and scientific discovery. Federal investments, many states, campuses, and businesses make investments in high performance computing for the support of computational simulation and analysis. These corporate entities, campuses, states, and the federal government need to understand and predict the costs associated with these programs as well as the return that can be expected on these investments.The objective of this project is to develop and provision a new cyberinfrastructure (CI) service, and to use the developed service to explore a range of benefits that may be conferred upon an institution or a region when an investment is made in high performance computing. Various sources of data, including the Top 500 list and NSF funding records, but also including funding records from other federal agencies, census data, and economic data from various sources including annual reports and stock market indices, will be integrated and presented as a web application that is publically accessible. Intellectual Merit: The developed CI service will be a web-based database and knowledge base application that will document the impact of high performance computing (HPC), including the impact on competitive funding at U.S. academic institutions. The CI service will also document and demonstrate the impact of HPC on economic development and economic competitiveness at the state, regional, and industrial sector level. This project will generate a web-based application that is not currently under development elsewhere. Given the current economic climate, this project will meet a current need of cyberinfrastructure to demonstrate the return on investment and the driving economic reasons for investing in high performance computing and, more broadly, cyberinfrastructure. Broader Impact: This project has the potential to transform research and educational activities by creating a new vision for HPC at academic institutions and to state and corporate partners. The vision will promote and encourage new levels of training, funding, and partnerships to support HPC, a cornerstone of computational science and engineering. This proposal combines interdisciplinary data from a variety of sources in novel ways not previously explored. We anticipate several types of collaborative opportunities emerging from this exploratory grant in areas that include science policy, economic development, data mining, and data analytics.The project will be of interest to computational researchers, funding agencies, and institutional research officers who must choose how to allocate funds for support of research in tight economic times. The project will also be of interest to state and federal funding officers who set policy for science funding, and who are looking for ways to create economic incentives at the state level. Finally, the project will be of interest to state and regional economic development officers and business analysts who will be able to use the results to quantitatively understand how HPC and CI can impact regional economies and corporate investment. Techniques for data analytics will be developed and applied in the project that will generate topics for interdisciplinary research projects in computer science, business management, and economics.