MRI: Acquisition of Hardware for the Enhancement of the ELSA High Performance Computing Cluster to Enable Computational Research at The College of New Jersey

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The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) will acquire equipment to significantly upgrade and enhance the Electronic Laboratory for Science and Analysis (ELSA) High Performance Computing cluster. TCNJ is a primarily undergraduate institution promoting a deep engagement of undergraduate students in research. Many of TCNJ's School of Science faculty members are working at the cutting edge of computational research in their fields, which include a broad range of areas including biochemistry/biophysics, genetics, bioinformatics, astrophysics, machine learning, and mathematical biology. In order to maintain a diverse and state of the art resource that meets the current and future computational needs of TCNJ's faculty and undergraduate students the current ELSA cluster requires targeted hardware enhancements. The new instrument will (1) enhance the research capacity and resulting scientific discovery of TCNJ's School of Science faculty members and their undergraduate research teams; (2) expose a greater number of undergraduate students and researchers to this powerful computational infrastructure through a series of newly developed High Performance Computing and data visualization short courses and workshops; and (3) improve access to the ELSA cluster for students traditionally underrepresented in STEM, as well as to researchers beyond TCNJ through a new collaboration with Open Science Grid.This project will expand the research programs of more than 13 faculty members (many of whom are early career faculty) spanning all five of TCNJ's School of Science departments. The computationally intensive work that will be supported through this project includes a diverse array of scientific efforts, including studies of pilus biomechanics, estimations of cell signaling processes, methods for investigating the strength of passwords and security of password systems, and improving our understanding of the most energetic objects in the universe. Currently, the research programs of TCNJ faculty members in these and other areas are restricted by inadequate graphic processing unit (GPU) resources and by the slow speed aging central processing unit (CPU) servers part of the current instrumentation. The new ELSA cluster will allow faculty and student researchers at TCNJ to run workflows ranging from embarrassingly parallel computations, to those that necessitate high levels of parallelization over hundreds of cores, intensive GPU computations, and remote visualization of simulation results. The instrument will thus ensure that these research programs are able to reach their full potential. This project will also benefit nearly 100 undergraduate student researchers each year who are part of these labs and work directly on the cluster. As a result, in addition to improving the capacity for scientific discovery, the proposed acquisition will help TCNJ meet the demands of developing an undergraduate workforce that is ready to leverage increasingly powerful High-Performance Computing resources, now and in their future careers.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.