Silicon Mechanics has announced that it is launching the 4th Annual Research Cluster Grant program, in which the company will award two complete high performance compute clusters to two institutions of higher education and research. The competition is open to all U.S. and Canadian qualified post-secondary institutions, university-affiliated research institutions, non-profit research institutions, and researchers at federal labs with university affiliations.
This is the first year in which the grant program will award two clusters; in the previous three years, a cluster was donated only to a single institution. This year’s expansion of the program reflects the program’s success in aiding research at the three prior recipient institutions. In addition, Silicon Mechanics has experienced significant organic growth over the past several years, enabling it to grow the grant program to better meet needs within the research community.
“We designed the cluster grant to provide resources to researchers who were unlikely to receive grants through traditional grant-funding programs due to the interdisciplinary, collaborative nature of their research or other similar factors,” said Art Mann, Silicon Mechanics’ education/research/government vertical group manager. “We have seen the impact that this program has had on our recipient institutions over the past three years, and felt that it was crucial not just to continue the program but to expand it, allowing us to support even more impactful research.”
Previous recipients of the Research Cluster Grant include Wayne State University in 2014, Tufts University in 2013, and Saint Louis University in 2012. The Research Cluster Grant program reflects Silicon Mechanics’ commitment to the advancement of innovative computational research, particularly at institutions with a great need for improved computing infrastructure.
Applications for the grant are now open, and details on the grant rules, application requirements, and cluster technical specifications are available at www.researchclustergrant.com. Submissions will be accepted through March 1, 2015, and the grant recipients will be announced on or before March 31, 2015.
The donating partners for this year’s grant clusters were Intel, NVIDIA, Mellanox, Supermicro, Kingston, Bright Computing, Seagate, and LSI Logic.
