INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY DIVISION
Office of the Provost

Compact Plan Initiatives: DRAFT 2

B.3. Support for Student Learning in a Technology-rich Environment (SLITRE): Research and High Performance Computing

NC State Research Computing Initiative ? (or Scientific Computing Initiative?)

Description of the initiative and objectives
Working in collaboration with partners in NC State's Office of Research, academic departments, and research facilities on-and off-campus, ITD proposes to help plan and implement a five-year, three-tier NC State Research Computing Initiative. The Research Computing Initiative would have the following objectives:

• Provide necessary computational resources for existing NC State high performance computing research activities; assist in transitioning, where possible, away from dependency on resources now supported by the NC Supercomputing Center (NCSC)
• Establish a sustainable financial model while preserving capabilities for high performance computing for triangle research universities
• Build on-campus competencies and resources in new high performance computing technologies, such as clusters and grids
• Enhance computing infrastructure and technical support available for NC State's research community and advance momentum in all areas of academic thrust (Environmental Sciences, Computer Networking, as well as Materials Sciences, Genomic Sciences)
• Accelerate technology transfer and enrich the academic computing environment, including increasing access to visualization, simulation and modeling capabilities that play an increasingly important role in science and technology education.
• Reestablish ITD's role as a source of support for NC State's research and scientific computing activities

State funding cuts in 2002 and other difficulties at MCNC and NCSC have caused a crisis for NC State faculty who depend upon high performance computing capabilities and expertise to do their research. If not responded to creatively and thoughtfully, the decline of the NCSC could result in significant losses for NC State-in its reputation as a research institution, in funding from grants, in the ability attract talented faculty and students and to foster their success. Furthermore, the current crisis at the NCSC has revealed additional vulnerabilities and needs for computational support for NC State's researchers, faculty and students.

The proposed Research Computing Initiative not just for faculty and research projects that depend upon megaflops of computational power. While many researchers on campus use high-end desktop machines to perform their research and calculations, there is a growing community (faculty and their research groups) whose needs exceed the computational power and the storage assignments available through the Unity/Eos environment or college-supported equipment. There are also some faculty whose computational needs should be met on campus but who use NCSC because of the expertise and software that has been available to them, from their perspective, "for free." These researchers do not require vector supercomputers or highly parallel computers like those that have been supported at NCSC, but they do require more support and resources than NC State can currently provide.

Research and scientific computing were once a main mission of NC State's Computing Center (now ITD). In the early 1990's administrators decided that student computing and support were more appropriate functions for the unit. As a result, NC State lost core competencies and technical expertise in research and high performance computing over the past decade. ITD is no longer in a position to support the intermediate computational needs of researchers in traditionally computation-intensive fields such as physical, mathematical and engineering sciences. Just as importantly, ITD is not able to provide needed support in emerging fields of research such as genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics and biotechnology.

The proposed Research Computing Initiative is a proactive a five-year, three-tier plan intended to both meet the needs of NC State researchers who require high-performance computing resources and to strengthen the campus computing environment.

Plan outline and timeline

Assessment

Resource Summary

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Last update 11/4/02 fw