A robust community of computational researchers UW’s Academic Plans have targeted computational science as a focus area over the last 15 years, and have resulted in the hiring of over 75 faculty whose research is highly computational in nature.
UW’s Advanced Research Computing Center (ARCC) UW’s cyberinfrastructure plan includes strategic, sustained investments (of around $1M/year) in networking, hardware, and personnel to support computational- and data-intensive research. This includes UW's Teton (a ~300 teraflop, high performance cluster for modeling and data analysis with a ~1.2 PB shared pool of network attached high performance disks.) and the petaLibrary (an array of shared network attached disks for UW researchers and collaborators). These systems are designed to allow faculty to use research funds to add capacity or capabilities. This campus research computer is available to all faculty and research groups across campus. The computing infrastructure is highly compatible with that found at the NWSC. See https://www.uwyo.edu/arcc for more information.
UW’s Visualization Center UW’s Energy Innovation Center houses a state-of-the-art visualization center that will enable data driven science and engineering research by transforming massive data sets into representations and patterns people can work with. See https://www.uwyo.edu/ser/visualization-center/index.html for more details.
Research computing support A cadre of IT specialists designed to enable faculty and student research is being developed. Currently, the team consists of an Interim Research IT Director (Mike Killean), a High Performance Computing systems managers (Jeff Lang), End User Support Manager (Dylan Perkins). They can be reached at arcc-info@uwyo.edu or directly via contact information at https://www.uwyo.edu/arcc/staff/.
Software support Over 100 research support applications are installed on Mount Moran and more can be added by request to arcc-info@uwyo.edu.
Access to significant allocations on a Petascale Supercomputer The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) is a petascale (5.34 X 1015, i.e. 5340 trillion operations per second), supercomputing center designed to maximize data-intensive science. The Wyoming legislature’s $40M investment in the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputer Center (NWSC) provides UW Earth Science researchers with a 20% allocation of the NWSC resource for the next 16 years. The allocation of computing resources to UW scientists is covered in a Memorandum of Understanding negotiated between UW, NCAR and the National Science Foundation and comes in the form of an NSF grant. See https://www.uwyo.edu/nwsc for more details.
HPC education and training programs UW offers both an interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate minor in scientific computing. In addition, efforts are underway to develop specially designed courses for entering graduate students, short-courses in Parallel Computing and Visualization, as well as regular joint workshops with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
World class connectivity UW is one of the founding members of the Front Range Gigapop (FRGP) and is currently the only university in the Rocky Mountain area to utilize a 100Gbit/sec bandwidth connection to Internet II and to other FRGP members (including Colorado universities and national labs such as NCAR.) A NSF Cyber Infrastructure grant also provided funds to establish a new Research Network on campus allowing connection to researchers systems at speeds beyond those of most campuses.
