My colleague Jerry Gilfoyle and I were just awarded an NSF grant to buy a new computing cluster. In the past, my students and I have mostly worked on problems that could be attacked with ordinary desktop computers. This grant means that we’ll be able to go after more computationally intensive problems. It also means I’ll have to learn about supercomputing techniques. Fortunately, Jerry’s very experienced at this.
This has been a good funding year for me: I submitted three NSF proposals, and all three were funded. That’s at least partly due to the federal stimulus bill: only one of the three is officially stimulus money, but no doubt all the stimulus money washing around freed up more non-stimulus money for other grants.
Correction: Actually, two out of the three, including the computing cluster, are stimulus funds. I’m nothing if not shovel-ready.
desktop computers these days gets obsolete the day that they are shipped considering how fast technology updates,`.
About 10 years ago, there was a paper on ArXiv which considered the question: should I start doing my calculations now, or should I wait x number of months and buy a faster computer then and start later but possibly finish earlier.
Got to love those fed stimulus bills!