Wayne State University Wins 2014 Research Cluster Grant

High-performance cluster managed by Bright Cluster Manager to aid with cutting-edge collaborative research

By Bright Staff | Apr 29, 2014 3:00:00 PM |

    

San Jose, California — Bright Computing partner, Silicon Mechanics, today announced it selected Wayne State University (WSU) to receive its 3rd Annual Research Cluster Grant. WSU will receive a high-performance computing cluster valued at $190,000, that was donated in part by Bright Computing. The university, located in midtown Detroit, is one of the nation’s 50 largest public universities, with annual research expenditures of nearly $260 million. WSU is one of only 3.5 percent of U.S. universities with the Carnegie Foundation’s highest research classification.

The new cluster is expected to provide a powerful and flexible new research tool for WSU, and will be shared by scientists focusing on chemistry, mathematics, physics, and biology, along with cancer and biomedical research.

“I am very pleased that Bright Computing could play a part in the research cluster grant program again this year,” said Dr. Matthijs van Leeuwen, founder and CEO of Bright Computing. “Our partner, Silicon Mechanics, has selected a worthy university to receive this year’s award, and I’m looking forward to seeing Wayne State put the cluster to good use.”

Wayne State’s Vice President for Research, Hilary Ratner, Ph.D., said, “We are thrilled to be a recipient of Silicon Mechanics' generous grant program. Our research faculty are pushing the boundaries of discovery, and this high performance computing equipment will help accelerate innovative work across our campus."

According to Art Mann, Silicon Mechanics’ education, research, and government vertical group manager, WSU stood out in the field of applicants for a number of reasons:

  • the high level of collaboration across departments;
  • the clear and convincing description of the need for the cluster;
  • specific applications that would use the CPUs, GPUs, and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors;
  • the extremely high level of benefit and positive impacts to faculty, students, and the greater Detroit community.
The HPC cluster includes hardware and software donated by Intel, NVIDIA, HGST, Mellanox Technologies, Supermicro, Seagate, Kingston Technology, Bright Computing, and LSI Logic. This year’s HPC cluster contains eight compute nodes, one head node, Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors, NVIDIA® Tesla® GPUs, and InfiniBand and gigabit Ethernet networking.

About Bright Computing

Bright Computing is transforming the way clusters are managed in the modern data center. Founded in 2009, Bright’s award winning cluster management software lets users monitor and build clusters of any size that are easy to provision, operate, monitor, manage, and scale. Bright partners include Amazon, Cisco, Cray and Dell. Customers include Boeing, NASA, Roche, Stanford University and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Bright’s technology is running in over 500 data centers all over the globe. Bright has been recognized as a Red Herring Top 100 company and a Deloitte Rising Star winner, and was named Bio-IT World’s “Best of Show.”

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