The College of Staten Island/CUNY’s High-Performance Computing Center (HPCC) has received a two-year, $723,547 grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled, “MRI: Acquisition of a high-performance computing resource to enhance research and undergraduate education at the College of Staten Island,” led by CSI Full Professor of Chemistry Dr. Angelo Bongiorno and the HPCC’s director Dr. Alexander Tzanov. Core participants include 22 faculty from CSI, Brooklyn College, Lehman College, Hunter College, New York City College of Technology, La Guardia CC, CCNY, Advanced Science Research Center, and The Graduate Center. The aim is to acquire hardware that will support graduate and undergraduate research at CSI and CUNY. Dr. Bongiorno added that users “of the facility that will be purchased thanks to this grant include physicists, chemists, mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, etc. from CSI and other CUNY colleges.”

Dr. Tzanov explained that “currently HPCC supports graduate classes and undergraduate classes in Computational Genomics, Computational Chemistry, and Computer Science. The new acquisition will boost the number of classes, enrich topics that are taught, and will expand research at CSI and CUNY.”

Dr. Tzanov also noted that “the new file system [as a result of this upgrade] will have double the capacity and 25 times better performance than the existing one. The new nodes will provide at least 155 times better performance than current ones and the interconnection between nodes will be eight times faster than current one.”

The High-Performance Computing Center, located on the CSI campus, was created in 2008 as an attempt to expand CUNY’s role as a competitive research University. Its goal is to support the scientific computing needs of CUNY faculty, their collaborators at other universities, and their public and private sector partners, as well as CUNY students and research staff, and high school students.       

Currently the Center serves more than 1,400 users from all campuses and from almost all majors. A total of 75% of the users are graduate and post-doctoral students from the Advanced Research Center, The Graduate Center, CSI, and all colleges. Of the remaining 25%, the majority of users are faculty followed by undergraduates and staff. In addition, each semester, HPCC supports several undergraduate and graduate classes in addition to 1,400 accounts mentioned above. For instance, for fall 2022, HPCC supports three graduate classes led by CSI faculty from Computer Science and Biology and one genomics undergraduate class (a total of more than 50 students).