In Gaurav Khanna's world, access to cutting-edge, high-performance computers can open up countless possibilities.
Khanna is a physics professor at the University of Rhode Island, studying mind-bending subjects such as black holes and gravitational waves.
But he’s also the URI director of research computing, and he’s excited about the possibilities open to him and other researchers at URI now that the university has become the first academic institution outside Massachusetts to join the Massachusetts Green High-Performance Computing Center.
URI’s partnership with the center – a collaboration of Boston University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts – gives URI cutting-edge capabilities to perform more-complex research in areas such as computational modeling, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Since the partnership was formalized last November, Khanna says, URI has capitalized on the advanced computing power in numerous ways. For example, the Graduate School of Oceanography has been developing high-resolution simulations of the storm surges along the Rhode Island coastline; the College of Engineering is designing new materials for use by the U.S. Navy; and the College of Pharmacy has been conducting complex genome sequencing.
“It gives us new capabilities,” Khanna said.
The high-performance computing center is located in Holyoke, Mass., and was established 10 years ago to provide state-of-the-art computing with a low carbon footprint. The racks of servers that fill the 33,000-square-foot computer room and the energy efficient system needed to cool those computers are powered by a hydroelectric plant on the Connecticut River.
As part of the new partnership, URI is also bringing money to the table – a $1.2 million legislative earmark secured by Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., for high-performance computing technology at URI.
That funding will be added to contributions from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and UMass Amherst to purchase $2.2 million of computer hardware and software that will be installed at the center in Holyoke.
In addition, OSHEAN Inc., a North Kingstown-based nonprofit coalition of universities, hospitals, government agencies and other nonprofits providing internet-based technology for its member institutions, has helped provide a dedicated high-speed connection between URI and the center more than 70 miles away.
Aside from the higher computing power, access to the center can pay off for URI in another way: proximity to world-class researchers from institutions such as Harvard and MIT. In many cases, faculty from various universities are working on similar projects, and the center can be a “collaborative playground” where there’s a benefit to sharing information and resources rather than competing for them, Khanna says.
Yes, competitiveness and rivalries still exist among some researchers, but the center “is an attempt to break that down,” he said. “The main goal is to foster collaboration.”
John Goodhue, executive director at Massachusetts Green High-Performance Computing Center, says the computers at the facility serve more than 20,000 researchers, educators and students. The center makes high-performance computing available to smaller and midsize institutions as well.
In recent years, URI has placed heavy emphasis on bolstering its research computing capabilities.
The university formed an Information Technology Research Computing Services team in 2020, and Khanna joined URI in early 2021 as its first director of research computing. URI says it will be adding several graduate assistants and a computational scientist to the IT Research Computing team in the fall.
Khanna says the scientist will be tasked with showing researchers across the university how the high-performance computing now available to them can be used to improve their work.
“It’s one thing to have this computational infrastructure,” he said. “It’s another thing to get people to use it. A large class of problems can be solved with computers.”
For his part, Khanna currently has URI astrophysics students studying what happens when two black holes smash together.
But there are also uses for the advanced computing that have applications closer to home, including the engineering work at URI to develop materials such as metals for naval use. Using computer modeling can save time and money. “It can be very expensive to keep destroying the materials” during testing, Khanna said.
And there’s the development of computer models to predict the effects of storm surges along the coast in southern New England. Khanna says the high-performance computing allows for more resolution than any provided by the National Weather Service, down to risks that particular streets and individual properties might face in particular scenarios.
In addition, URI’s advanced computer power permits the use of machine learning, in which the models can become more accurate at predicting outcomes without being programmed by researchers.
“It’s a very significant project to our region,” Khanna said.
Correction: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the Massachusetts Green High-Performance Computing Center's relationship with smaller and midsize research institutions. The center already makes high-performance computing available to smaller and midsize institutions.
