In 1997, Indiana University (IU) began a purposeful and steady drive to expand the use of supercomputers and what we now call cyberinfrastructure. In 2001, IU implemented the first 1 TFLOPS supercomputer owned by and operated for a single US University. In 2013, IU made an analogous investment and achievement at the 1 PFLOPS level: Big Red II, a Cray XE6/XK7, was the first supercomputer capable of 1 PFLOPS (theoretical) performance that was a dedicated university resource [2]. IU s high performance computing (HPC) resources have fostered innovation in disciplines from biology to chemistry to medicine. Currently, 185 disciplines and sub disciplines are represented on Big Red II with a wide variety of usage needs. Quantitative data suggest that investment in this supercomputer has been a good value to IU in terms of academic achievement and federal grant income. Here we will discuss how investment in Big Red II has benefited IU, and argue that locally-owned computational resources (scaled appropriately to needs and budgets) may be of benefit to many colleges and universities. We will also discuss software tools under development that will aid others in quantifying the benefit of investment in high performance computing to their campuses.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract