Developing a High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium for Multi-Disciplinary Applications on ACM Campuses

Christopher Fasano, Professor of Physics, Monmouth College

High Performance Computing (HPC) has the potential to change the manner in which we live our lives, conduct our research, collaborate with colleagues, and teach the academically well-prepared, intellectually engaged students that we attract to ACM colleges.

This Collaborative Event will bring together colleagues from the ACM at a two-day workshop on High Performance Computing in late spring/early summer 2010. We anticipate attendees from traditionally computationally-intensive fields and from newly computationally-intensive disciplines like biology, economics, visual arts, media, and others.

The short-term goal of this project is to foster intensive discussion about moving toward a shared high-speed computing system across ACM campuses, to compare needs and interests, and to begin to plan a faculty development workshop on applications of high-speed computing to be held in summer 2011.

The long-term goal is to form a High Performance Computing Consortium that shares both physical computing resources (and software) for all the ACM colleges and provides a regular opportunity for faculty members to meet to discuss HPC-related applications, projects with students, curricular innovations and research. This consortium will allow ACM schools to remain in dialogue with (and to a degree competitive with) research universities; but far more importantly, such a consortium would allow us to develop our own unique niche as we explore the applications of HPC in the context of liberal education.