Silicon Mechanics Awards Research Clusters

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siliconmechanicsToday Silicon Mechanics announced the recipients of its fourth annual Research Cluster Grant (RCG). Dordt College and The City College of New York will receive HPC Clusters with a combined value of over $175,000 to support growing research programs.

We designed the cluster grant to provide resources to researchers who were unlikely to receive grants through traditional grant-funding programs due to the interdisciplinary, collaborative nature of their research or other similar factors,” said Art Mann, Silicon Mechanics’ Education/Research/Government Sales Manager. “We have seen the impact that this program has had on our recipient institutions over the past three years, and felt that it was crucial not just to continue the program but to expand it, allowing us to support even more impactful research.”

Silicon Mechanics created the RCG in 2012 as a way of giving back to the educational community, as obtaining needed research funding has become more difficult in recent years. In particular, the program is helping to jumpstart research efforts where access to high-performance computing is limited, outdated or was not previously available. The RCG program is also providing institutions with an opportunity to showcase collaboration across departments and researchers by providing cluster technology to positively impact research efforts.

At CCNY, the HPC cluster will be used in cutting-edge research in biochemistry, chemistry, biology, physics, earth and atmospheric sciences, computer science, engineering, medicine, mathematics, social science, humanities and writing pedagogy.

For many of our research programs, this computer cluster is the missing piece that will lower the barriers that kept our work from moving forward smoothly,” said David Jeruzalmi, professor of chemistry and biochemistry in CCNY’s Division of Science, who wrote the grant proposal. “This award will touch the research of many colleagues by bringing together researchers from across CCNY, many of whom never knew that their work could be positively impacted by colleagues down the hall or in the next building over.”

At Dordt College and at its research partner, Hope College, the HPC cluster will support eight STEM-based research groups and nine distinct faculty members focused on a wide variety of research activities. Those activities include bacterial statistical genetics, processing and analysis of RNA sequencing, phylogenetic trees, computational chemistry, engineering integrity, analyzing genomic sequencing data, population genetic data and more.

Dordt has traditionally been a liberal arts school,” said Dr. Nathan Tintle, Dordt College’s Director for Research and Scholarship. “In recent years, however, we have ramped up our research department in partnership with Hope College and in doing so created a demand for an HPC system. Unfortunately, we don’t have the budget to purchase a cluster that would suit our computational needs. Fortunately, Silicon Mechanics sponsors the annual RCG, a program that we are proud to be involved with. We feel fortunate to have been awarded this grant.”

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