Research notes supercomputing access benefits

The possible benefits of the Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network (ARE•ON) and expansions of the network have been noted in a recent University of Arkansas report saying access to better computing systems increases research competitiveness at U.S. universities.

ARE•ON was funded in 2005 and eventually connected 11 Arkansas universities — including the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith — by mid-2010. Mike Abbiatti, executive director of ARE-ON, said during a 2009 interview that the new network “will bring Arkansas to a new level in terms of research and technology, giving us opportunities we’ve never seen before.”

Abbiatti also said the network will give Arkansas campuses unique access to research and academic resources and allow for sharing among the universities’ current and future supercomputers.

At UAFS, the ARE•ON network provides supercomputing access that was once available only at larger universities.

Then in 2010, it was announced that the University of Arkansas System would receive a $102 million grant to expand broadband access in the state. The U.S. Department of Agriculture funds allow the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock to upgrade and expand Arkansas’s broadband networks by offering substantial broadband upgrades, broadband equipment and connectivity fiber. The project will connect about 475 community institutions to broadband and could benefit as many as 1.32 million people and 61,000 businesses.

On Monday (Jan. 24), the Arkansas High Performance Computing Center at the University of Arkansas said recent research shows a direct correlation between research competitiveness and super computer access.

“Overall, our models indicated that investment in high-performance computing is a good predictor of research competitiveness at U.S. academic institutions,” said Amy Apon, director of the Arkansas High Performance Computing Center. “Even at modest levels, such investments, if consistent from year to year, strongly correlate to new NSF funding for science and engineering research, which in turn leads to more published articles.”

The UA statement offered the following narrative to explain why such access is important: “Supercomputers have significantly altered scientific work. Modeling and simulation have become central to modern science and engineering. The National Science Foundation and many other agencies and foundations have identified computational science as a third paradigm of science, in addition to analysis and experimentation. More recently, data-driven science, also made possible by high-performance computers, has been mentioned as a fourth paradigm.”

According to the UA statement, Apon; Stan Ahalt at the University of North Carolina; Moez Limayem, information systems professor in the Sam M. Walton College of Business; and colleagues at the University of North Carolina, IBM and Trinity College in Ireland – used information from U.S. News and World Report’s list of college rankings and five additional institutions that have made significant investments in high-performance computing.

The researchers used many variables of interest to determine the impact of investment on competitiveness. These included the sum of published articles, sum of funding from the National Science Foundation, sum of federal funding in general and sum of funding from specific federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense. Data from these variables were measured and analyzed using two statistical models.

The research found an “economically and statistically significant effect on greater funding from the National Science Foundation and published articles by researchers at investing institutions.” Also, the research noted that if initial one-time investments in computer access and equipment is not maintained, federal funding, the number of published articles and other benefits begin to decline after two years.

“Our results suggest that institutions that have attained significant returns from investment in high-performance computing in the past cannot rest on laurels,” Apon noted in the statement. “Maintaining strong investment in high-performance computing is associated with strong, but quickly deprecating returns in terms of both new funding and new publications.”

The Arkansas High Performance Computing Center supports research in computer science, integrated nanoscience, computational chemistry, computational biomagnetics, materials science and spatial science.