Silicon Mechanics has launched its 3rd Annual Research Cluster Grant program, in which the company will donate a complete high-performance computer cluster as part of a highly competitive research grant. The competition is open to all US and Canadian qualified post-secondary institutions, university-affiliated research institutions, non-profit research institutions, and researchers at federal labs with university affiliations.

Silicon Mechanics has configured an HPC cluster, valued at about $190,000, which includes hardware and software donated by Intel, NVIDIA, HGST, Mellanox Technologies, Supermicro, Seagate, Kingston Technology, Bright Computing, and LSI Logic. This year’s HPC cluster contains eight compute nodes, one head node, Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, and InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet networking.

Submissions will be accepted through March 1, 2014. The grant recipient will be announced on or before March 31, 2014. Submissions will be reviewed for merit and for the potential impact the research may have on the institution’s mission. Silicon Mechanics strongly encourages collaboration, within and across departments of a single institution, or across multiple institutions. Details on the grant rules, application requirements, and cluster technical specifications are available at www.researchclustergrant.com.

“With the support of our partners and their many generous donations of state-of-the-art hardware and software, Silicon Mechanics is excited to be able to build upon the success of our Research Cluster Grant Program,” said Art Mann, Silicon Mechanics’ education/research/ government vertical group manager. “We have been inspired by the role the HPC cluster has played in the institutions that have been awarded prior research grants, and look forward to continuing to use the program to support cutting-edge research.”