The University of Rhode Island (URI) announced that it is the first academic institution not based in Massachusetts to join the Massachusetts Green High-Performance Computing (HPC) Center.
The HPC Center is a collaboration between the five major research universities in Massachusetts – Boston University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, and the University of Massachusetts (UMass). URI joins the collaboration to help advance research computing efforts in the region, including establishing new computational resources and enabling collaborations among URI and all the major Massachusetts universities.
In a press release, URI said that earlier this year it began collaborating with the center and its member institutions, launching a number of pilot projects allowing URI researchers to make use of key computational facilities, including UMass Amherst’s UNITY cluster, MIT Lincoln Lab’s SuperCloud, Open Storage Network, North-East Storage Exchange, and high-speed connectivity via OSHEAN.
Following a formalized partnership agreement last month, URI will host its own high performance computing hardware at the Massachusetts center and will jointly operate it with UMass Amherst’s research computing systems. URI will also be installing $1.5 million worth of new high performance computing hardware, which will serve as a computational platform enabling new regional research collaborations.
“Scholarly work is increasingly dependent on technology,” said URI President Marc Parlange. “From the digital humanities through computationally intensive ocean modeling, our work often depends on data analytics, simulation, visualization, and many other digital domains. This investment supports our common goal of continuing to build on our regional, national, and international research profile. It will build on our strong track record of computing investments and position us to help address pressing global issues across the disciplines and colleges.”
In a press release, URI said that early interactions between the university and member institutions have already resulted in fruitful outcomes for the regional National Science Foundation-funded CyberTeams CAREERS program, as well as the submission of several joint NSF proposals with UMass Amherst and UMass Dartmouth.
“In this era of cross-university research collaboration so vitally necessary for advancing progress toward our grand challenge problems, I am very excited that URI is able to partner with our colleagues in Massachusetts,” said URI Chief Information Officer Karlis Kaugars. “This new partnership will enable our faculty to more efficiently engage in these types of collaborations with their peers and represents a huge step forward for regional collaborative efforts.”
