Minnesota Supercomputer Institute

MSI's Mission

The mission of the Institute is supercomputing research, which is defined broadly to include a variety of research activities from many disciplines. This research involves the use of high-performance computing environments to address problems in the physical, biological, medical, mathematical, and computing sciences and engineering as well as other fields that use computers in their research. The goal is to promote successful attacks on problems that could not otherwise be attempted.

The Supercomputing Institute promotes its mission concretely in several ways. It facilitates all aspects of high-performance computing and scientific modeling and simulation as well as graphics, visualization, high-performance network communications, informatics, and data mining by means of computer resource allocations, laboratories, and seed grants. Research efforts often result in domain-specific algorithms and codes that exploit the available computing environments as well as visualization techniques to enhance insight, make displays more informative, and add multimedia values to communications and work environments. In many other cases, research may involve activities aimed at the design or evaluation of high-performance computing hardware, operating systems, networking, and general-purpose algorithms and software.

Ways the Institute promotes the interchange of ideas

To promote supercomputing research, increase University-industry collaboration, and promote technology transfer, the Institute promotes interchange of ideas in the field of supercomputing research, including the dissemination of results of research accomplished with its resources. Institute efforts have included and can include:

The chief vehicle of Institute support for education is faculty supervision of research in scientific computation by postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students.