Research Infrastructure: CC* Campus Compute: Lawrence 2.0: Advancing Multi-Disciplinary Research and Education in South Dakota

The Lawrence 2.0 project expands and updates the Lawrence high performance computing cluster at the University of South Dakota (USD), advancing computationally intensive research and science education throughout South Dakota. The project's initial science and education use cases directly address several fields of immediate national prominence, including clean energy, sustainability, post-traumatic stress disorder, and the effects of anthropomorphic climate change. This project also complements and enhances existing Artificial Intelligence research and education initiatives at USD by keeping pace with growing demand for highly accessible GPU-accelerated computation, particularly among users who are new to high performance computing. Open and available to users at all educational institutions in South Dakota, the expanded Lawrence cluster bolsters research and STEM education opportunities at South Dakota's smaller colleges and universities. Additionally, the project increases USD's contributions to the Open Science Grid (OSG), with all unused compute cycles on Lawrence made available to the OSG Open Science Pool. The project consists of achieving the following four key objectives: (1) Adding capacity to the Lawrence cluster to accelerate progress on research projects throughout South Dakota; (2) Reducing individuals' barriers to entry by implementing Open OnDemand software for cluster access; (3) Avoiding disruptions to scientific progress by replacing Lawrence's aging core components; and (4) Broadening high performance computing participation and impact via targeted outreach to regional collaborators and tribal institutions. This project is having impact and expanding research and STEM education in South Dakota, an EPSCoR state. This award by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is jointly supported by 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.