MRI-R2: Acquisition of a GPU cluster for solving n-body systems in science and engineering

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Graphics Processors (GPUs) are potentially a cost effective and low power vehicle for science and engineering research that requires high performance computation. The primary challenge to the use of GPUs more broadly is the difficulty in programming. Dr. Walker and a team of colleagues representing five different scientific and engineering disciplines propose to pursue research topics in each of the disciplines. By selecting important research topics which require a fundamentally similar computational algorithm for a class of problems labelled "n-body problems", the project offers opportunity for meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration across scientific domains that are normally quite distinct. Since, solutions to this class of problem are particularly well suited to GPUs, there is likelihood of advances in multiple areas of scientific interest at a fraction of alternative costs and power. Therefore NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) is supporting the acquisition of the instrument.