Dr. Hall Named "Campus Champion" for Supercomputing Network

As Campus Champion, Dr. Hall will assist the Dominican community with access to supercomputing resources on the XSEDE network.

There are about 400 Campus Champions at 200 U.S. colleges, universities, and other research-focused institutions. The Campus Champions help researchers at their institutions to use computational resources in research and teaching, especially (but not exclusively) large scale and high-end computing.

Access to supercomputer resources will benefit both Dominican faculty and students, Hall says.

“These features are not available at most universities and therefore gaining access to XSEDE resources offers the chance for faculty and students to engage in qualitatively different and challenging research and teaching projects,” Hall says.

For example, Hall’s local workstation in the School of Health and Natural Sciences has 12 “cores” or computers that can work together simultaneously to solve a problem 12 times faster than on a single core. XSEDE computers have many more cores available. Hall uses the Comet supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, which has more than 47,000 cores.

In the past two years, Hall has involved six of his research students in work using the Comet computer. An additional five students will be using it this semester.

One project, a joint project with Dominican’s Dr. Mary Sevigny, assistant professor of biology, is studying how naturally occurring differences in the cyclooxygenase protein may affect its role in regulating inflammation in the body. The students are in charge of setting up and performing the calculations and analyzing the resulting data.

Another project involves studying the properties of small clusters of gold and sulfur atoms that can act as catalysts (to speed up reactions) or sensors (to detect small amounts of different chemicals). The students are similarly in charge of project.

Campus Champions peer-mentor each other in order to learn to be more effective. The Campus Champion community has a very active mailing list where Champions exchange ideas and help each other solve problems, regular conference calls where we learn what's going on both within the Champions and at the national level, and a variety of other activities.

“This allows me to get advice on how to find out what is being done on a specific topic outside my area of expertise to give advice to Dominican faculty on how the resources may benefit their research,” Hall says.

Hall will also receive an allocation of computer time that can be used to let other Dominican faculty use the computational resources to investigate the use of XSEDE in their research.