The NDSU Center for Computationally Assisted Science and Technology (CCAST) has joined national distributed computing groups OSG (Open Science Grid) and XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment).

CCAST is the high-performance computing center and research unit housed within the NDSU office of Research and Creative Activity. The center provides high performance computing infrastructure for the entire NDSU Campus and NDSU Research and Technology Park by engaging in computational scientific discovery across energy, materials, environment, genomics, and other areas of national priority. 

“The additional capacity we will gain as an OSG and XSEDE member organization will vastly increase power and variety of the computer-based computational tools we can offer to NDSU researchers,” commented Dr. Dane Skow, Executive Director for CCAST. “The result will be a reduction in the time required for computationally-intensive projects.” 

Jointly funded by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, OSG is a partnership of cyberinfrastructure resources across the nation designed to meet the needs of research and academic communities of all sizes in a wide variety of scientific disciplines. OSG completes more than 500,000 research computing jobs daily with more than 125 institutions sharing resources. 

"OSG is pleased to welcome NDSU to our distributed high-throughput computing collaboration,” said OSG executive director Frank Wuerthwein, professor of physics at the University of California San Diego and Distributed High-Throughput Computing Lead at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. "We look forward to providing NDSU faculty and students access to OSG’s shared high-throughput computing infrastructure and to fully integrate NDSU HPC systems with the shared national cyberinfrastructure."

XSEDE is a National Science Foundation funded virtual organization that coordinates sharing of advanced digital services including supercomputers and high-end visualization and data analysis resources with science researchers nationally. Almost all U.S.-based university and non-profit researchers are eligible to request allocations via XSEDE for access to nearly two dozen world-class computational and storage resources.

In a letter to NDSU, XSEDE Program Manager Ron Payne commented, “XSEDE looks forward to working with you and your staff at NDSU to further the mission of XSEDE and the NSF in advancing the nation's research capability.”

Dr. Kelly A. Rusch, Vice President of NDSU’s Office of Research and Creative Activity stated, “While these agreements have great benefits for our researchers, they are also an indication of our ability to partner with the larger national research community. Since joining NDSU only two months ago, Dr. Skow has had an immediate impact on CCAST. The experience he brings will continue to strengthen our leadership in regional supercomputer and processing capabilities.”

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