High-performance computing clusters and a classroom that includes advanced visualization capability are available for any faculty and students who have need for it. The classroom can be reserved through EMS.

High-Performance Computing Cluster

Hope College operates a high-performance computing cluster called curie that is available for any faculty member and associated students to utilize for research or coursework. Please contact Brent Krueger or CIT if you wish to have access to curie.

Mission

The Computational Science & Modeling (CSM) Laboratory is a set of interdisciplinary resources designed to support student-learning by enabling the integration of computation in research and teaching at Hope College.

Motivation

Computational modeling is one of the most significant developments in scientific inquiry in the 20th Century. While scientific research has been successful in identifying the fundamental laws that govern our world, the advances promised by these discoveries have not been fully realized because the real-world systems governed by these laws are often extraordinarily complex. Computer-based modeling provides a way to understand and predict the behavior of complex systems based on knowledge of these fundamentals laws combined with experimental and/or observational data. Computational modeling also allows simple, well understood components to be combined into a single complex system, providing a unified description of complex behavior. Hope’s Computational Science Facility will help students to understand and predict the behavior of complex systems with experimental and observational data. Hope College emphasizes interdisciplinary science education through research and a research-integrated curriculum. Our goals are to foster faculty development through interdisciplinary teaching, prepare students for future challenges through original research, and develop and enhance a quantitatively rich interdisciplinary curriculum focused on complex systems.

History

Infrastructure for the CSM Laboratory was included in the construction of the Hope College Science Center, completed in 2004. This infrastructure includes power and cooling for high performance computing in a 280 sq. ft. server room (SC 3101A) and a 15-seat, 880 sq. ft. computer classroom (SC 3101).

The science division received a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in 2004 to fund a number of interdisciplinary curriculum activities including substantial hardware and software for the CSM laboratory, including the curie high-performance computing cluster. Since then, several individual faculty grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have provided additional and updated hardware for the cluster.