MRI: Acquisition of a Big Data and High Performance Computing System to Catalyze Delaware Research and Education

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Cyberinfrastructure (CI) drives progress in science, engineering, and business in a major way, as stated prominently in the 2015 presidential National Strategic Computing Initiative. CI - consisting of computer, data, networking and related resources - enables new ideas and products to be explored "virtually," without building expensive prototypes and physical experiments. CI also powers almost all business processes today. This project implements a major computational and data resource at the University of Delaware (UD), enabling and accelerating progress in all sciences and addressing grand challenges facing our society. Through partnerships with regional universities, colleges, health institutions and the private sector, the new resource will also boost research, development, and education in the greater Delaware area.The acquired compute and storage system will serve as a critical and transformative upgrade to Delaware's cyberinfrastructure, enabling research and educational activities for a large number of faculty across all UD colleges as well as for users from academic and industrial partners within the broader Delaware region. The requested instrumentation is designed to enable research broadly across disciplines with diverse software and hardware needs including, but not limited to, problems that scale to large numbers of processors and data sets, involve large data transfers, use advanced graphics accelerators, and require new operating modes. It will also serve to train students and researchers on computational and data-intensive methods and enhance these skills in the greater Delaware region. The acquisition of the instrumentation, called DARWIN (Delaware Advanced Research Workforce and Innovation Network), will complement ongoing UD initiatives focused on improving and enhancing networking, storage, and compute infrastructure. This addition will also be timely, providing great synergy with the new UD Data Science Institute and the faculty network in high-performance computing led by the project investigators.This project is jointly funded by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC), the Office of Integrative Activities, and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).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.