Almost a year after its opening last November, Brown's supercomputer is already being put to use by about 200 researchers, according to Director of the Center for Computation and Visualization Jan Hesthaven.
"We had sort of planned a big PR spiel in the fall, but I'm actually a little worried about doing it now," due to the already large amount of interest, Hesthaven said.
He estimated about two-thirds of the users are looking into what the supercomputer can do for their research, while the other third are heavier users.
"In the last month and a half, the number of users has really grown very dramatically, and we see a lot of users coming in and wanting to try it out to see if this is something they can use in their research," Hesthaven said. "They're taking advantage of the fact that 200 is still a relatively low number, so it's a big playground, and they're getting a lot of work done."
Professors, graduate students, postdoctoral students and a few companies — which must pay a small fee for use of the computer — make up the bulk of the users, Hesthaven said.
He said he hopes to expand the supercomputer's potential throughout the next year using grants like this September's $20 million Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research grant, from the National Science Foundation. The grant was awarded to the University of Rhode Island to be applied to a research network of other schools, including Brown.
"In that, there's a substantial amount of money for what's called bioinformatics — how to look at genes and DNA and how to understand what it all tells us," Hesthaven said. "All that is very heavily computational, and a lot of that will be driven by what we have here."
Though the supercomputer was not an essential part of applying for grants like this one, Hesthaven said it strengthens the case for proposals at Brown and around Rhode Island that involve large amounts of data.
As far as sharing with neighbors at URI and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., Hesthaven said Brown "will serve them to the extent that it's possible, but there has to be priority given to the Brown community."
"Ultimately, it is a University resource," Hesthaven said.
Though there was some talk last year of allowing Rhode Island middle- and high-school students to use the supercomputer, Hesthaven said the center currently lacks the staffing capacity, but he would be excited to pursue the idea if funding became available.
Hesthaven told The Herald earlier this year he hoped the supercomputer might make the TOP500 — a prestigious list that ranks the world's 500 most powerful computing systems — but he said the center has not yet entered its supercomputer in the running.
"It's a little bit like preparing for a very large test," Hesthaven said.
To enter the competition, owners of computers around the world give their computers a standardized problem, and report how long their computers took to solve it. The top 500 entries are ranked every six months.
"The question is: Do we want to spend the resources to maybe make it onto the list? I actually do think that we would make the list, but it would still be a significant investment in time and resources," Hesthaven said.
Even if the supercomputer made it onto the list, Hesthaven said it would likely only be on for six months.
Though Brown lays claim to the only supercomputer in Rhode Island, the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth was awarded $200,000 by the NSF this June for its own supercomputing facility. But Hesthaven said having this other supercomputing cluster so close to Brown would not likely affect use of the University's center.
"That really is much more of a local resource that a small group of people would use," Hesthaven said. "For them it makes a big difference, but in the bigger picture, it's nothing unusual."
