Computing support for research in knowledge representation and reasoning

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This RTI grant application is for equipment to support the research computing needs of the three applicants, who are all members of the Knowledge Representation Group at the University of Toronto. Between us we are currently supervising 18 graduate students (13 PhD and 5 MSc), and the equiptment has to support their research needs as well. Our current computational facilities, both individual platforms as well as shared computational resources, are in serious need of replacement and upgrading. In particular, we need to replace our students' desktop computing environments, and to obtain compute server and high performance disk storage resources needed for our research. Our student desktop equipment has reached an age where maintenance costs are no longer cost effective, and their research has been increasingly limited by a lack of compute resources. Our group engages in a wide variety of research, much of which has significant potential for practical impact. We are widely acknowledged as being world-leaders in a number of research areas. However, much of our research requires significant computational resources to perform empirical evaluations, and our current computing environment has reached a stage where it is now an significant impediment to our research progress. This grant, if successful, will bring our environment back up to the level it can more fully facilitate our research.