Loyola University Maryland Wins Grant to Build HPC Cluster for Research
Loyola
University Maryland has been awarded a $280,120 grant from
the National Science
Foundation (NSF) to build its first high-performance
computing (HPC) cluster, which will be used for faculty and student
research across disciplines.
The grant proposal, "Acquisition of a Computing Cluster to
Enable Transformative Research across Disciplines," identified 11
research projects — in fields such as software development, medicine
and social policy — that will be the first to run on the HPC cluster.
Some of the research projects identified in the
award abstract include:
- Developing techniques leading to drugs to fight SARS;
- Understanding protein-DNA interactions for biotechnology
applications;
- Providing policymakers with a better understanding of how
job competition and human capital allocation influence the optimal
design of unemployment insurance;
- Improving software quality by helping programmers identify
and avoid the introduction of dependence clusters;
- Improving techniques for coordination in pursuing a moving
target, such as in military operations, autonomous automobile police
chases, or surveillance programs;
- New methods for the creation of fossil fuel alternatives;
- Providing secure communications for mobile devices in the
Internet of Things; and
- Improving techniques for nondestructive evaluation of
electromagnetic materials, which is of critical importance in
agriculture, bio-electromagnetics, aerospace, and the design of
integrated circuits.
The HPC cluster will subsequently be made available to other
researchers and undergraduate students at the university. Loyola is
primarily an undergraduate institution, and until now those students
have not had access to HPC clusters for research, unlike their peers at
large research institutions. With this new HPC cluster, Loyola
undergraduates will have the opportunity to receive training and
mentorship using high-performance computing for
computationally intensive tasks and multi-disciplinary research, helping prepare them for graduate studies and computational work in their
careers, according to the award abstract.
"Our students will now have access to HPC cluster resources
similar to what they would find at a large research university," said
Megan Olsen, assistant professor of computer science and principal
investigator on the grant, in a news release. "This is really the
future in a lot of different fields."
Olsen's three co-investigators on the grant project are Biggi
Albrecht, associate professor of chemistry; David Binkley, professor of
computer science; and Jeremy Schwartz, associate professor of
economics, all from Loyola.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at leilameyer@gmail.com.