CMC earns large NSF grant for high-powered research equipment

Science professors with the new high-performing computing cluster

CMC Professor Paul Nerenberg (second from right), served as the Principal Investigator for an NSF consortium grant for a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster, with support from CMC Professor Shibu Yooseph (far right) and HMC Professors Jamie Haddock (second from left), Bilin Zhuang (far left), and CMC Professor Angela Vossmeyer (not pictured). Photo by Anibal Ortiz. 

A powerful, high-performance computing (HPC) cluster that will significantly expand computational capacity and facilitate advanced research across several disciplines, will soon arrive on Claremont McKenna College’s campus, thanks to a $918,485 Major Research Instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

CMC and Harvey Mudd College were awarded the consortium grant to prepare the next generation of students in the natural, computational, mathematical, and social sciences.

“The high-performance computing cluster provided by this grant will be an invaluable resource for researchers in diverse fields at CMC and Harvey Mudd,” said Ran Libeskind-Hadas, Kravis Professor of Integrated Sciences: Computational Biology and Founding Chair of the Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences (KDIS).

“Within the natural sciences, this cluster will allow our faculty to study a number of fundamental questions that advance basic science and, ultimately, have important applications in human health and other areas,” he continued. “Student researchers working on these projects will gain invaluable experience in computational science through the use of this cluster.”

Paul Nerenberg, Kravis Associate Professor of Computational Science, served as the Principal Investigator (PI) on the consortium grant, with support from Shibu Yooseph, Kravis Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics; Angela Vossmeyer, Rothacker Family Associate Professor of Economics and George R. Roberts Fellow; Jamie Haddock, Iris & Howard Critchell Assistant Professor of Mathematics at HMC; Bilin Zhuang, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at HMC; and several other colleagues from CMC and HMC.

Shortly after joining KDIS as a founding faculty member in summer of 2023, Nerenberg, who successfully garnered NSF awards while at previous institutions, galvanized his colleagues and began working on the grant application. “KDIS is brand new,” he said. “And we knew we would have the need for a high-performance computing cluster to expand our institutional research capacity.”

While the HPC cluster’s power to perform quadrillions of calculations per second is awe-inspiring on its own, Nerenberg is impressed by the breadth and depth of research that CMC and HMC colleagues plan to accomplish once the equipment is installed in 2025.

“The unique hardware of this HPC cluster will enable CMC faculty and students to engage in computationally intensive research in a variety of disciplines,” he said. “The projects will run the gamut from creating new types of econometric models of financial institution stability, to developing new algorithms for searching large microbiome datasets containing billions of molecular sequences, to generating efficient techniques for solving eigenvalue problems that are critical to computational simulations in a range of scientific fields.”

Inspired by the tight-knit community at The Claremont Colleges to reach beyond the natural sciences to colleagues with diverse academic backgrounds, Nerenberg said, “We felt it was important to lean into the liberal arts model. I knew there were faculty in math who needed high-performance computing for their research, and then I got to know some folks in economics who were doing computational modeling.”

Even before arriving at CMC, Nerenberg—a computational scientist who uses physics-based simulation methods and machine learning methods to study molecular systems—was drawn to the promise of assembling KDIS, a new department with programs organized around three major grand challenges related to the health of our species, our brains, and our planet.

“KDIS is an interdisciplinary science department that is building expertise among the entire CMC student body about how to use computation in service to answering whatever questions interest them,” Nerenberg said.

As he co-teaches “Codes of Life,” the KDIS course first offered in Spring 2023 that explores contemporary challenges in human health and the life sciences using a combination of laboratory and computational methods, Nerenberg sees firsthand the benefits of this approach. “Our students are able to access different perspectives than they would if it was just a typical introductory science course or typical GE science course,” he said.

Nerenberg added that accessing different perspectives and skill sets is key to success once students graduate from CMC.

“We want our students to graduate being knowledgeable and equipped with skills relevant to current and future workspaces. I think graduates who are coming out of college with those skills will automatically have a bit of a leg up on ones who don’t.”

Helping students acquire these increasingly important and broadly applicable skills, accelerated with the arrival of a high-performance computing cluster, directly ties into CMC’s mission to prepare students for thoughtful and productive lives, and responsible leadership in business, government, and the professions.

“From our standpoint, students benefit from the opportunity to perform research using this kind of hardware,” Nerenberg said. “Becoming familiar with its capabilities, and the types of research and tasks that they can accomplish using it, is really going to help prepare them to be thought leaders in whatever endeavor they engage in afterward.” 

Track the progress of the Robert Day Sciences Center, the soon-to-be home of KDIS. 

Anne Bergman

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