Campus champions connect researchers to the TeraGrid

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The second of the TeraGrid series of articles that Cluster Monkey is running is up now (I pointed to the first earlier).

Navajo Technical College in New Mexico is a small tribal school hardly flush with research computing equipment, said Jason Arviso, director of the information technology office and National Science Foundation Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) grant program at Navajo Technical. Conversely, Clemson University in South Carolina went from zero to nearly 50 teraflops and the Top 500 supercomputers list in a few short months. “I know that eventually we won’t have enough nodes for everybody,” said Barr von Oehsen, director of computational science in the Cyberinfrastructure Technology Integration Group at Clemson.

The two schools have the same problem at a time when high performance computing (HPC) is being applied in most STEM fields of research and scholarship. A commonality also exists in the way this “cycle deficit” is being addressed by von Oehsen and Arviso. They’ve both turned to the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid, the world’s largest, most comprehensive cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research, education, and innovation. By becoming Campus Champions, they are making it easier for researchers and educators on their campuses to access free, readily available computational resources from 11 NSF-funded national supercomputing centers and TeraGrid Resource Provider sites across the country.