UH data science institute awarded $1M National Science Foundation grant
Summary
“This award brings together some of ’s greatest strengths and important new initiatives, leveraging several investments and strategic decisions made over the past several years to help our faculty and students apply modern computational and visualization approaches to answer questions about the world around us,” said President David Lassner. “Housed in our sustainable new data center in the Information Technology Building, this state-of-the-art high-performance computing system will support some of our major new initiatives including our work to understand our water systems in Hawaiʻi, our study of the microbiome of our environment, and our new multi-disciplinary data science institute.” The three initiatives Hawaiʻi Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research’s ʻIke Wai project, the Center for Microbiome Analysis through Island Knowledge and Investigation and the Hawaiʻi Data Science Institute all conduct work with advanced computational needs that will benefit from the new computing cluster. “The fact that both faculty and students will have access to this free, shared resource is truly exciting and transformational.” The new cluster, named Mana, will add graphics processing unit ( ) nodes for intensive computing among other upgrades to the high-performance computing ( ) cluster and support 15 early career, pre-tenure faculty with research programs in data science. “My research focuses on and machine learning for data science applications in precision health, oceanography, high-energy physics and astronomy,” Sadowski said. This would be significantly more difficult and expensive on a commercial cloud service or a government supercomputer.” Professor Jason Leigh, principal investigator of Mana, spoke of ’s importance for the future, “Mana will provide us with much needed computing power to realize the next-generation of artificial intelligence-enhanced data visualization, analysis and collaboration tools for accelerating research, development and workforce training, even in fields as diverse as cyber-security and creative media.” “We are very excited to receive this award which recognizes the research excellence of all our faculty at and most importantly the enormous research potential of our new investigators,” said Gwen Jacobs, principle investigator and director of cyberinfrastructure.