Silicon Mechanics, Inc., announced this week that Wayne State University (WSU) is the recipient of the company’s 3rd Annual Research Cluster Grant. This includes donation of a complete high-performance compute cluster from Silicon Mechanics and several of its partners.

Wayne State, located in midtown Detroit, which can always use some good news, is one of the nation’s 50 largest public universities, with annual research expenditures of nearly $260 million, and it is among only 3.5% of US universities with the Carnegie Foundation’s highest research classification. The addition of the Silicon Mechanics' cluster to the WSU facility will provide a powerful and flexible new research tool.

As a significant update to WSU’s current computing grid, the cluster will be shared by a variety of the most computation-intensive research groups on campus. The grant application was submitted jointly by two interdisciplinary collaborative research teams, and includes both computer scientists and domain scientists focusing on chemistry, mathematics, physics and biology, along with cancer and biomedical research.

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."

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.

Silicon Mechanics' Annual Research Cluster Grant Program awards a complete HPC cluster to an educational or research institution through a highly competitive grant process. This program enables SIlicon Mechanics to support state-of-the-art computing in higher education and cutting-edge research to help universities change the world--one high-performance cluster at a time. Previous Cluster Grant recipients include Tufts and St. Louis University.