Background

The U.S. government has realized the importance of advanced Cyber-Enabled computing. The U.S. House tried twice to pass the High Performance Computing Revitalization Act (2004, 2005). NSF sponsored the Petascale Computing Initiative and awarded the University of Illinois $208 million to develop “Blue Waters,” the first sustained Petascale Computing System, which is expected to be the world's most powerful computer when it becomes operational in 2011. President Obama has pledged to enhance the U.S. information infrastructure, including HPC. We are coming to consensus that we need computation to sustain our research.

Michigan State University (MSU) is aggressively pursuing this goal. In the last five years, MSU has committed $3.5 million to establish itself as a leader in providing advanced computational resources that support Cyber-Enabled Discovery in a variety of research areas. As part of this commitment, Michigan State established a High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) in Fall 2004 to provide hardware and software support to researchers across campus. MSU is also working with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a member of the NSF-funded Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation (GLCPC, http://www.greatlakesconsortium.org/).

In order to better focus these efforts in computational research, training and collaboration, MSU has further committed $10 million dollars over the next 5 years to establish the new Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research (iCER). This Institute provides a common structure for researchers from across academia and industry to work on how computation can better their research. In addition to being the new home of the HPCC, iCER’s goals will include developing collaborative, interdisciplinary projects through a faculty scholars program and post-doctoral fellowships.