NSF Funding for High Performance Computing Instrumentation
The School of Computing and Information Science has received a grant from the National Science Foundation under their Major Research Instrumentation Program in the amount of $350,000, with another $150,000 in cost-sharing contributed by UMaine. The grant, entitled “MRI: Acquisition of a high-performance computing instrument to support deep learning, modeling/simulation, and visualization for STEM”, will support machine learning, scientific modeling and simulation, and computer graphics and visualization at UMaine and across the region by purchasing a cluster of state-of-the-art general purpose GPUs that will bring several petaFLOPs (trillions of floating-point operations per second) in computing capability to UMaine. Over 30 senior personnel from around the state participated in the proposal process, with projects ranging from deep learning (neural networks) for intelligent agents to modeling climate change data to visualizing astronomical data to genomics. The principal investigator is CS faculty member Roy M. Turner, and the co-PIs are Sofian Audry (past New Media faculty member), Bruce Segee (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Peter Koons (Earth and Climate Sciences & Climate Change Institute), and Huijie Xue (School of Marine Sciences). Funding begins October 1 and continues for 3 years.