The Research Cluster Grant Recipient is
Saint Louis University!

Congratulations to Saint Louis University! The winning proposal presented an interdisciplinary deployment of the cluster, enabling research for the Digital Theology, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Biology, and Chemistry Departments, as well as for the School of Business at SLU.

A few of the things that Saint Louis University will be working on include:

• The Digital Theology Department will be supporting research in the field of paleography, and will be processing large sets of image data. They will be handling pages of pre-modern, hand-written, unpublished manuscripts, parsing out individual letters and glyphs. This work will be able to offer paleographers access to a much larger body of data with which to work.


• The Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering areas are currently studying the aerodynamics of airdrop systems and the aerodynamics of turbomachinery. The Department will use the research cluster to study new parachute concepts for weight and materials. The goal is to enhance the ability to accurately deliver cargo by airdrop, which is particularly important for missions that routinely airdrop critical relief supplies.


• The Biology Department will be expanding their research in the areas of climate change, modeling high-elevation plant community ecology in the Andes Mountains.


• The Chemistry and Engineering Departments will be studying carbon nanotubes, and developing computational models to predict solubility in organic solvents. They will also be investigating the docking of intercalators with DNA, and will be able to dramatically reduce computation times.


• The School of Business will use the cluster hardware to develop algorithms to approximately solve large-scale stochastic dynamic programs, which can lead to improved supply chain management techniques through better logical decision making.

About the Grant

Silicon Mechanics sponsored a unique grant opportunity: a complete High-Performance Compute Cluster using the latest AMD Opteron processors and NVIDIA GPUs. The cluster had been used by Boston University to compete in the SC11 Student Cluster Competition in November 2011. Enabled by many generous donations from our vendor partners, we decided to donate the cluster as a Research Grant.

The grant program was 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. The rules were as follows:

1. 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.
2. Submissions will be accepted from November 14, 2011 through February 15, 2012. The grant recipient will be announced on March 15, 2012.
3. Submissions will be reviewed for merit and related impacts.
4. Applications should be submitted in .rtf or .doc format
5. Applications should be no longer than 3-5 pages, and must address the application questions in the application document.
6. Along with your application, you must submit a signed copy of the affirmations (below the Application Questions) in electronic format.
7. The cluster is covered by standard warranties from Silicon Mechanics and its partners.
8. Neither Silicon Mechanics nor its partners will be responsible for any costs incurred by the awarded organization as part of installing, operating, or managing the cluster.
9. Neither Silicon Mechanics nor its partners make any claim to any research on or intellectual property generated or deployed on the Research Cluster Grant or used in the Competition Submission.

The grant application was downloaded 3,690 times, and we received 190 applications. The decision to award the Grant to Saint Louis University was made by a committee of representatives from each of the sponsoring organizations.