Upgrading to a Sustainable Infrastructure for Research Computing

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This proposal is to enhance the existing research computing facility and network connections at the University of Arkansas Fayetteville campus. This award will provide the infrastructure support for the planned HPC acquisitions to achieve a target core count of about 6000 cores, which require a target data center capacity of 300kW, and 10Gbps networking connectivity in support of research computing. The renovations include adding a new electrical service entrance, uninterruptible power supplies, additional cooling capability, campus research network upgrades from 1Gbps to 10Gbps and a research network path from the campus to INTERNET2.The research that will be supported by the renovated facility is of the highest intellectual merit. Research areas that will be enabled by this infrastructure project include integrated nanoscience, computational chemistry, computational biomagnetics, materials science, and spatial science. Planned collaborative projects include the programming of alternative architectures (including GPGPUs and multicore), and modeling, measurement, and experimental evaluation of new parallel hardware and software, including with industrial partners will be an outcome of this grant.The research to be supported by the renovated facility has very broad impact. Insights from nanoscience research, as well as the direct use of the so-called inverse method, will have great impacts on the design of new and improved devices, such as actuators, sensors, and data storage. Chemistry research will enable the prediction of acidities of drug-type molecules, enabling the development of new drugs. The biomagnetics research has the potential of developing a completely passive, non-invasive technique for breast cancer detection. Nanocomposite research has broad impact on sensor design and application, specifically sensors that employ polymer-based nanocomposites as integral components. The spatial science research has broad impact in the reliability of spatial data. The Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network (ARE-ON) will connect all public four year institutions of education in Arkansas. The renovated facility will be available to all ARE-ON institutions and to collaborators in West Virginia.We estimate that over the course of the grant period more than 600 undergraduate students and more than 150 graduate students will utilize the facility.