CC* Campus Compute: Building a Computational Cluster for Scientific Discovery

The University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) aims to strengthen its cyberinfrastructure to meet the evolving needs of research-oriented faculty and to facilitate the increasing demands of externally funded projects. This project aims to address the growing research mission that accompanies the increase in research activities. The project enables transformative research and supports a multitude of projects in areas such as magnetic dynamics, animal biomechanics, quantum mechanics, super-resolution bio-imaging, mobile hardware architecture exploration, genomics, bioinformatics, and computational fluid dynamics. The computing hardware consists of a heterogeneous mix of compute nodes to cater to various machine learning (ML) workloads. Components include GPU-accelerated nodes, multi-core CPUs, and specialized hardware that is developed for accelerating ML and AI workloads. A high speed fabric interconnects hardware and software. UCCS shares these computing resources with groups such as Open Science Grid (OSG). By contributing to the global pool of OSG resources, the system enables advanced research across the nation. The project supports student training in IT and cyberinfrastructure, fostering diversity in the project's personnel and impact. The technical insights gained will be shared extensively within research computing and scientific communities. 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.