Wichita State and other adjacent regional universities were recently included in a
grant to expand access for remote use of Oklahoma State University’s supercomputer. The computer can process large amounts of data at once and is housed at the OSU
Stillwater campus.
The new technology will elevate the research capabilities of Wichita State as well
as other schools in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kansas (OAK) region.
“This is a great example of higher education institutions coming together and pooling
their resources together to help accelerate research,” said Dr. Terrance Figy, Wichita
State associate professor of physics, mathematics and statistics.
In addition to expanding access, part of the grant will include workshops and training
available to WSU students, faculty and researchers.
Figy is the campus coordinator for granting remote access to the OSU supercomputer.
Students can contact him to get access to a request form. Figy is also responsible
for the workshops and training to use the supercomputer including BeoShock, WSU’s
high-performance computing cluster (HPC).
“The supercomputer really benefits students because instead of using their laptop,
which will probably take a long time, they will have access to large amounts of computing,”
Figy said. “Your typical laptop has maybe four cores computing.”
Jonathan Folkerts, a Ph. D. student in applied mathematics, is one of many students
who has taken the BeoShock training and has have benefitted from his ability to access
the supercomputer for his research.
“BeoShock has been invaluable to my research,” Folkerts said. “When I run the same
programs on my personal computer, I can only use three cores of the computer, which
are slower than the cores on BeoShock. On BeoShock, I can run programs on 72 threads
in parallel for days at a time, and this enables me to simulate particle physics interactions
that I could never have simulated on my own.”
Figy says access to the computer has not only been beneficial to students, but it’s
also helped researchers and faculty who are teaching courses. He says it basically
benefits anyone who is working in the physical sciences, mathematical and biological
sciences.
“For example, when they were working on the Manhattan Project, they had all these
calculations to perform, but there were no computers, only people, so Richard Feynman
devised a strategy to break up the math problems into small chunks and then distribute
those problems to small groups of people,” Figy said. “This way you’d have a room
of people and once they solved their problem, they would take all these pieces and
add them up together. This is what supercomputer does: Instead of human beings, it's
now electrons.”
Figy said this can even support the math behind intricate climate studies that require
billions of calculations.
“If you did them one at a time, you would never solve them for them to be effective,
but if you do them all at the same time, you would get the answers in parallel,” Figy
said. “It’s an efficiency thing, but modern industries are also demanding these skills
because they want students coming out of higher education to be able to work on large
supercomputers to search for things such as pharmaceuticals.”
Figy says that supercomputers were used by researchers to discover the vaccine for
COVID-19. Without the supercomputers, he says there would not have been vaccines for
COVID-19. He hopes that similar research can be performed and expanded at WSU now
that computer capability is available.
