The University of South Carolina was just awarded $1.1M with a National Science Foundation MRI grant to purchase a High-Performance Computing cluster (HPC) for boosting AI enabled science, engineering, and education in South Carolina. This grant will be led by the PI Prof. Ming Hu (Mechanical engineering), two Computer Science Co-PIs (Prof. Jianjun Hu and Prof. Forest Agostinelli) and additional two Co-PIs (Prof. Sophya Garashchuk of chemistry, and Sagona, Paul of Div. IT).

The new HPC instrument (with both new GPU and CPU servers) will be hosted at USC but will be made accessible to students of more than 10 regional universities such as Claflin University, Furman University, Francis Marion University, Costal Carolina University, College of Charleston, Charleston Southern University, Winthrop University, Presbyterian College, Benedict College, USC Beaufort and etc. It will promote research in diverse fields such as materials science, physics, chemistry, engineering, computer science, bioinformatics, health science and humanities, all enhanced by the HPC, big data and AI tools. The project team will also organize training workshops for AI-enabled scientific research and engineering innovation, education programs for undergraduate students, and summer camps for high school students in the coming years. More information will be posted on the project website at http://ai4science.sc.edu.