Funded by a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, faculty member Weikuan Yu is leading a team to pursue multidisciplinary research on computational climate modeling, computational atomic physics and applied computer science. The team includes faculty member Mitch Pindzola from the Department of Physics, faculty member Hanqin Tian from the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences and Computer Science and Software faculty member Cheryl Seals.

The team is working to build a cutting-edge compute and storage cluster to enable multidisciplinary research on computer systems and scientific simulations. It will leverage the latest many-core general-purpose computing on graphics processing units and high-performance InfiniBand interconnect technologies. The cluster is expected to deliver nearly 30 Teraflops of floating point computation power at its peak. The project is expected to result in optimized scientific codes, fine-grained ecosystem simulations and accurate environmental change predictions. This project, and the cluster to be deployed, will also serve as an incubator for more interdisciplinary computational research initiatives at Auburn.