Equipment: MRI Consortium: Track 1 Acquisition of a High-Performance Computing Cluster for Interdisciplinary Research at the Claremont Colleges

This MRI award will enable Claremont McKenna College (CMC) and Harvey Mudd College (CMC) to acquire a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster. Both CMC and HMC are primarily undergraduate institutions that place a strong emphasis on the engagement of students in research. This HPC cluster will be used by faculty and undergraduate students to perform research in a diverse set of disciplines spanning the natural sciences, mathematics, and economics.

These research experiences will be transformative for the students by training them in state-of-the-art computational techniques that are widely employed in both academia and industry. The principal investigators will organize an annual multidisciplinary HPC research symposium, enhance existing courses involving computation, and enable the participation of high school students from underrepresented backgrounds in summer research.

The joint CMC-HMC HPC cluster will contain a balanced mix of CPU and GPU resources, as well as large-memory nodes, that will support the research programs of ten faculty members at the two colleges. The heterogeneous hardware configuration of the HPC cluster will allow these faculty to develop and employ a variety of computational models in disciplines ranging from the natural sciences to mathematics to economics.

Examples of the research projects that will be furthered by this cluster include the development of effective thermodynamic theories and efficient simulations to study solvent-solute interactions, fast ultra-sensitive algorithms and space-efficient representations for homology detection in large microbiome datasets, mathematical models for opinion dynamics using non-convex optimization methods, and machine learning and simulation techniques for constructing econometric models to assess the stability of financial institutions. Collectively, these projects will advance knowledge in both applied and theoretical areas of multiple disciplines, provide new models and software tools for their respective scholarly communities, and train and engage a new generation of undergraduate students in computational science.

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.