Faculty and Staff Receive Grant for High-Performance Computing Cluster

A team of UNC Charlotte faculty and staff led by Dennis Livesay, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics, has received nearly one-half million dollars from the National Health Institute for the purchase of a high-performance computing cluster. The resource will provide expanded computing access to support an array of computational biology efforts, including projects in protein stability and dynamics, protein electrostatics, RNA structure prediction, and digital processing of biological images. The large cluster includes 608 computing cores, 1.2 terabytes (TB) of Random Access Memory (RAM) and 56 TB of usable disk storage.

“This resource will significantly expand our high-performance computing capabilities, which is increasingly important across a wide variety of scientific and technical disciplines,” said Dr. Livesay. “In essence, it will allow us to simulate larger and larger systems much more quickly.”

Other participating grant investigators are Dr. Cynthia Gibas (Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics), Dr. Min Shin (Department of Computer Science), Drs. Andriy Baumketner and Donald Jacobs (Department of Physics and Optical Science), Drs. Wei Cai and Shaozhong Deng (Department of Mathematics and Statistics), and Dr. Chuck Price (University Research Computing).