CU, CSU land NSF grant to aid in purchase of $3.9M supercomputer

Colorado State University and the University of Colorado Boulder have received a $2.73 million National Science Foundation grant to aid in the purchase of a high-performance computing system that can cut day-long computations down to seconds.

CU and CSU will split the purchase and support of the $3.9 million system, which will be housed on the CU campus and accessed through a fiber connection at CSU as if the computer were on the Fort Collins campus. Other universities and research centers in several states will also be able to access the system, according to Friday’s announcement by CSU.

“By far, this will be Colorado State’s most advanced computing system ever,” said H.J. Siegel, Abell Endowed Chair Distinquished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at CSU, in a press release.

SPONSORED CONTENT

How Platte River Power Authority is accelerating its energy transition

Platte River Power Authority, the community-owned wholesale electricity provider for Northern Colorado, has a history of bold initiatives.

The system will be used by faculty, students and staff at both CU and CSU for research and education. High-performance computing can support research in a range of disciplines, including physics, engineering, materials science, earth science and bioinformatics.

The new system will have more than 10,000 processing units, with a total computing capacity of about 500 teraflops.

“If a scientific application that takes one day to execute on a high-end desktop can exploit the parallelism of our new system, its execution can be reduced from one day to 10 seconds,” said Siegel, principal investigator on the NSF grant.

Principal investigator at CU is the school’s director of research computing, Thomas Hauser, while Edwin Chong and Jessica Prenni served as co-principal investigators at CSU.