USD Receives $500K Grant for Supercomputing from the National Science Foundation
Led by Ryan Johnson, director of research computing, KC Santosh, Ph.D., chair, Department of Computer Science, and Dan Engebretson, Ph.D., vice president for research and sponsored programs, the award is the latest in a series of NSF grants supporting computation and data-intensive research at USD.
The funding will be used to acquire a new supercomputing cluster named Spirit, advancing computationally intensive research and science education across South Dakota. It will also address several fields of widely recognized importance including clean energy, sustainability, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the effects of anthropomorphic climate change.
“Many problems that are interesting to scientists can’t readily run on a traditional computer because those systems lack the necessary storage, memory, or because the calculations would take too long to complete,” said Johnson. “Supercomputing aims to overcome these issues, allowing researchers to run much larger calculations, which can potentially be completed in hours, as opposed to taking weeks or months to run on a single laptop.”
The award also strengthens USD’s contribution to the Open Science Grid (OSG), a consortium of research communities that provides distributed computing resources for scientific research around the world.
“The utilization is cyclical, with varied periods of relatively high or low use. Since 2023, we have used excess computing cycles to run OSG jobs during periods of lower usage, which has contributed to dozens of research projects beyond USD and South Dakota,” said Johnson.
In addition to research, the grant supports USD’s growing artificial intelligence (AI) programs by enhancing education initiatives and increasing access to graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated computation, particularly among users who are new to high performance computing.
This expansion aligns with the university’s AI Lab, which was established in 2015 and is led by Santosh, and includes more than two dozen researchers including postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate students.
“The lab is dedicated to developing high-end AI models to address complex challenges in precision medicine, drug discovery, business analytics and precision agriculture,” said Santosh. “These cutting-edge research initiatives require significant computational power for training large-scale machine learning models, running deep learning simulations and handling big multimodal datasets. Investing in advanced supercomputing infrastructure will not only accelerate AI-driven discoveries but also position USD as a leader in AI research and innovation. Thanks to the NSF, we are now prepared to develop the next generation of AI models."
For more information on the grant, please visit the NSF official award page.
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