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.

To learn more about BeoShock or to sign up for the training, visit the Wichita State HPC User guides page.