Aishwarya Bhosale is a graduate student pursuing a Master’s in Engineering Management at Purdue University. Her background is in Computer Engineering, and she has five years of industry experience as a Product Manager in consumer technology. Last month, Bhosale attended the 2026 GDC Festival of Gaming, thanks to assistance from a WHPC scholarship. This year marked the 40th edition of the conference, where the entire games industry came together across five days to learn, connect, collaborate, and celebrate. We sat down with Bhosale after attending GDC to discuss the conference and learn about her experiences whilst there:

Can you describe your overall experience at the conference?

Attending GDC in San Francisco was an incredible and energizing experience. The conference brought together thousands of professionals across game development, product, engineering, and design, creating a rich environment for learning and networking. As someone who has worked in the gaming industry, being in that space as a graduate student felt like a full-circle moment.

What was your biggest takeaway from the conference?

My biggest takeaway was seeing how deeply artificial intelligence is reshaping game development workflows, from procedural content generation to live-ops automation, which aligned directly with my own product experience. I also gained valuable insight into how product and engineering teams at major studios are thinking about scalable infrastructure and computing systems to power next-generation games. Connecting with industry professionals reinforced that my skills in cross-functional product management are highly transferable as the field evolves. It left me feeling energized and excited. Did you have any fun or exciting experiences outside the planned conference sessions? San Francisco was a wonderful host city—I had the chance to explore some of the iconic spots overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and enjoy the food scene during the evenings. I visited some great restaurants in the Mission District and got to experience the energy of the city with other conference attendees. The experience of being in a city so central to the tech world also felt motivating in its own right.

Has your experience led you to consider future involvement in research computing or HPC?

Attending GDC deepened my appreciation for the computational infrastructure that underlies large-scale interactive systems, and it has made me more curious about how HPC resources are leveraged in gaming and simulation environments. While my primary path is in product management, I can see myself working at the intersection of product strategy and high-performance computing, particularly as real-time AI and large-scale data processing become central to game development. I'm open to engaging with the research computing community here at Purdue to better understand how these systems work at scale. This experience has certainly broadened my perspective on what's possible.

How did support from Purdue WHPC make this experience possible for you, and how do you feel about receiving the support?

The scholarship support from Purdue WHPC made it possible for me to attend GDC without the financial burden of travel, accommodation, and registration costs, which would have otherwise been a significant barrier as a graduate student. I am deeply grateful for the investment the organization made in my professional development and growth. Knowing that a community of women in computing believed in supporting my journey made the experience feel even more meaningful. Would you recommend the WHPC scholarship program to other Purdue students? Absolutely, I’ve already recommended it to many of my classmates and even encouraged a few to attend recent RCAC events. I would strongly recommend the WHPC scholarship program to any Purdue student interested in computing, technology, or related fields.

Conferences like GDC provide exposure to industry trends, meaningful networking opportunities, and a level of career clarity that’s hard to replicate in a classroom setting. If you have the opportunity to apply, take it. The experience can genuinely shape the direction of your career.

Did you have any prior involvement with Research Computing or WHPC?

Prior to attending GDC, I was involved at Purdue as the VP of Communications for the Graduate Women in Business Club, which reflects my commitment to supporting women in technical and professional spaces. My industry background includes building data pipelines, working with product analytics platforms, and managing technically complex systems—experiences that connect naturally to research computing principles. I was relatively new to the WHPC community, making this scholarship a wonderful introduction to the organization. I hope to remain more actively involved going forward.

Purdue Women in High-Performance Computing Program

Purdue Women in HPC is part of a broader engagement initiative by the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) and is led by women staffers affiliated with RCAC. WHPC is a dedicated community encompassing undergraduate, graduate, staff, and faculty men and women who are interested in exposing women to high-performance computing and encouraging their pursuit of research and careers in HPC and other technology fields.

Within the WHPC initiative, RCAC provides partial travel assistance to undergraduate and graduate students, empowering their participation in various national conferences that align with WHPC’s objectives. The WHPC travel scholarship sends students to numerous conferences each year, most recently including the Grace Hopper Celebration, Society of Women Engineers, and Supercomputing.

For full eligibility requirements, and to apply for this scholarship, please visit the WHPC Scholarship page.

In addition to the scholarship program, Purdue WHPC organizes a range of activities, including regular meetings to discuss technical HPC-related issues of interest, opportunities to network with the WHPC community, a mentorship program, workshops, and exposure to external resources and opportunities.

If you would like to attend and/or are interested in future participation, please contact us at whpc@purdue.edu. You may also subscribe to our WHPC List Serve.

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu

The “AI Across Purdue” seminar series seeks to bring together Purdue faculty and researchers to explore AI opportunities and build connections across campus and NSF-supported programs. Each session features two 20-minute faculty talks on how they are using AI at Purdue, followed by 20 minutes of Q&A and networking. Since the first meeting in early Spring of 2026, the series has connected more than 100 Purdue faculty and researchers, highlighting the importance of dedicated discussions that explore all aspects of AI in research and education.

Unlike traditional training and workshops, this series focuses on advancing knowledge through the sharing of lived experiences and open discussion amongst those at the forefront of AI. Thus far, the talks have covered a wide variety of subjects: materials, mechanical, and nano/quantum engineering, agriculture, biology, and language and culture, as well as some of the AI infrastructure that the researchers used, such as the Gautschi Community Cluster and the Anvil supercomputer. By participating in the “AI Across Purdue” seminar series, attendees not only develop their own AI skillset but also help shape the future of AI at Purdue.

While the “AI Across Purdue” faculty seminar series has been tremendously successful thus far, there’s still time this semester for you to join the conversation. The past and remaining schedule for the series is as follows:

• February 10th: Professor Nikhilesh Chawla (Materials Engineering), Professor Alexandra Boltasseva (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
• March 3rd: Professor Yan Gu (Mechanical Engineering), Professor Jinha Jung (Civil and Construction Engineering)
• March 10th: Professor D. Marshall Porterfield (Agricultural and Biological Engineering), Professor Yaguang Zhang (Agricultural and Biological Engineering)
• March 24th: Professor Vanesa Cañete Jurado (College of Liberal Arts), Professor Maurice Tetne (College of Liberal Arts)
• April 7th: Professor Edwin Garcia (Materials Engineering), Professor Romit Maulik (Mechanical Engineering)
• April 21st: Professor Prianka Baloni (Health Sciences), Professor Mia Liu (Physics and Astronomy)
• April 28th: Professor Mustafa Abdallah (Computer and Information Technology), Professor Rua M. Williams (Applied and Creative Computing)

Each session is attended by RCAC and IPAI organizers in order to answer questions and assist with any AI challenges faced by the attendees. They also acquaint participants with the numerous AI services available through Purdue and the NSF, including the NAIRR Pilot, ACCESS Program, Genesis Mission, Purdue Center for Research Software Engineering, and RCAC AI Support and Expertise.

More information about the “AI Hubs Faculty Seminar Series: AI Across Purdue,” can be found on our Seminar Series Event page.

To stay apprised of upcoming AI-related news and training, please subscribe to our RCAC newsletter and our IPAI newsletter.

RCAC operates the centrally-maintained research computing resources at Purdue University, providing access to leading-edge computational and data storage systems as well as expertise and support to Purdue faculty, staff, and student researchers. To learn more about HPC and how RCAC can help you, please visit https://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ or reach out to https://www.rcac.purdue.edu/rcac-help@purdue.edu to request consultation.

The Institute for Physical Artificial Intelligence (IPAI) is Purdue’s hub for faculty collaboration at the intersection of AI and the physical world. IPAI connects researchers across disciplines to develop secure, robust, and deployable AI systems. Spanning models, hardware, robotics, autonomy, and ethics, IPAI helps apply these capabilities to shared research challenges and emerging opportunities across industry and government domains. To learn more, please visit https://ipai.research.purdue.edu/ or email https://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ipai@purdue.edu.

Anvil is funded under NSF award No. 2005632.

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu

Artificial intelligence is changing the world. Whether it be in research, education, business, or pleasure, there’s hardly a facet of life that AI hasn’t touched. In research, AI and machine learning are making an impact in almost every scientific field, reducing time-to-science and enabling breakthroughs at a rate previously unimagined. Those who harness the power of AI will be positioned to make world-changing discoveries—which is precisely why RCAC set out to provide Purdue with an AI ecosystem designed to enable excellence at scale. To achieve this, RCAC focused its efforts throughout 2025 on three crucial areas: hardware, software, and expertise.

Next-generation GPUs for AI research

AI and machine learning tools and methodologies can revolutionize the research and education landscape, but require the appropriate hardware in order to work; i.e., advanced GPUs. Step one for RCAC was to build and deploy a supercomputer laden with top-tier GPUs and designed to enhance AI workflows in research. Enter the Gautschi Community Cluster.

Gautschi is a state-of-the-art community cluster eponymously named in honor of Walter Gautschi, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Purdue University. The supercomputer is a dual-partition system: Gautschi CPU, optimized for traditional, tightly-coupled science and engineering applications; and Gautschi-AI, designed specifically to enhance AI research at Purdue. Thanks to support from Purdue Computes and the Institute for Physical AI (IPAI), Gautschi-AI was built with cutting-edge H100 GPUs, which utilize NVIDIA’s Hopper architecture and a Transformer Engine in order to provide training and speeds that are four times faster than previous generation models. Gautschi-AI has eight total H100 GPUs with 80 GB of RAM, providing Purdue researchers with a whopping 10.7 PetaFLOPS of peak performance—ample processing power for even the largest AI jobs.

RCAC’s deployment of the Gautschi Community Cluster quickly proved successful—the system’s impact on AI research at Purdue has been astounding:

• 45 Principal Investigators (PIs) from 18 departments have purchased allocations (11 new PIs added in Q4, including 2 new departments)
• 18 IPAI affiliate PIs applied for matching allocations
• 700k GPU hours delivered in 2025 (Would cost on average $8.7M to procure at commercial cloud prices)
• IO500 benchmark for worldwide ranking of Gatuschi’s storage capabilities ranked at #20 on 10-node production system
• Completed mixed-precision LINPACK benchmark for another worldwide ranking of Gautschi, ranked #27 in the world

While Gautschi is Purdue’s most powerful supercomputer to date—and the major hardware focus for 2025—it isn’t the only one helping researchers in their AI efforts. Gilbreth is another community cluster available at Purdue. The system received its third expansion in 2024 and now has a total of 411 GPUs, nearly four times its original capacity. Gilbreth is designed as a high-performance computing (HPC) resource specifically optimized for “throughput” applications, supporting general-purpose, medium-scale simulations as well as large numbers of smaller AI jobs. Even though Gilbreth’s resources are primarily comprised of the previous generation NVIDIA GPUs, the system has had a major impact on AI research at Purdue. Between Gautschi and Gilbreth, Purdue AI supercomputers provided 3 million GPU hours in 2025, which would have cost Purdue faculty over $15M to procure on commercial clouds.

To purchase access to the Gautschi Community Cluster today, please visit RCAC’s Cluster Access Purchase page. IPAI is currently offering a matching program for Gautschi-AI, with IPAI matching a one-year allocation of one GPU for each GPU purchased (up to 8 GPUs). To take advantage of the matching program, all researchers need to do is provide a written description of their project and how it relates to physical AI alongside their purchase order.

Software infrastructure for AI workflows

With the AI-specific hardware needs being met by Gautschi and Gilbreth, RCAC’s next step was to ensure the underlying software infrastructure was ready to support AI workloads and researchers. Accomplishing this task required a myriad of software developments, implementations, and solutions, but one key project took center stage for the organization—Purdue GenAI Studio.

Purdue GenAI Studio is an LLM service that makes open-source LLM models accessible to anyone at Purdue. Developed in collaboration with IPAI, the intent behind the tool was to provide an LLM service that researchers could easily access and use, and which negates the concern of leaking intellectual property or proprietary data. Unlike other LLM services, Purdue GenAI Studio is hosted entirely on-premises using resources within Purdue’s supercomputers, providing researchers with more democratized access to LLMs, as well as more control. No documents or contexts are uploaded into commercial cloud-hosted AI services, nor are any chats, documents, or models shared between users or used for training.

The team at RCAC worked hard throughout 2025 to iteratively develop and improve Purdue GenAI Studio. The LLM service currently has 30+ language models spanning multiple model families (Llama, Mistral, Phi, Gemma, and specialized domain models), and has been integrated with advanced features, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), web search capabilities via SearXNG, and document parsing with Docling. Unsurprisingly, given the need for such a tool within research contexts, Purdue GenAI Studio has been met with great success:

• 2500+ active users across research, instruction, and administrative units at Purdue
• Over 22,000 messages delivered by chat UI
• More than 2 Million messages, 1.7 Billion tokens delivered by LLM API in January of 2026 alone

Purdue GenAI Studio is helping users across every discipline to take the next giant leap in their research. The LLM service has been so successful that RCAC has been solicited by peer institutions to provide consultation on establishing similar infrastructure at their respective locations.

To learn more about Purdue GenAI Studio or access the tool, please visit: https://www.rcac.purdue.edu/knowledge/genaistudio?all=true

Expertise for Supporting AI Applications

The final step in RCAC’s plan to thrust Purdue into the vanguard of AI innovation is vitally important, yet easy to overlook. The hardware is in the data center. The software is under the hood. RCAC provided all the tools researchers would need for their AI endeavors. Now the center had to ensure the researchers would know how to use them.

Throughout 2025, RCAC—already known for its world-class HPC support and expertise—set out on the ambitious task of supplying Purdue with as much knowledge on AI for research as possible. The plan was multi-pronged, involving collaborative engagement across multiple teams within the organization. From training and outreach events to consultations and collaborations with its Research Software Engineering Center, RCAC made AI a key focus for its support services.

Training was arguably one of the largest pieces of the AI support services puzzle, with the overarching strategy needing to account for both breadth and depth in order to help Purdue researchers across the board. To advance AI research, knowledge dissemination was crucial. Training efforts focused on ensuring researchers, educators, and students could confidently use AI tools while understanding their limitations, ethical implications, and best practices. The cumulative impact of these efforts was impressive. In the fall of 2025 alone, RCAC delivered 30 training sessions, partly arranged as four thematic series, with more than 1000 people participating in the sessions. RCAC also led multiple signature AI training events throughout the year, including AI Day and summer camps, which saw an additional 150+ participants in extended thematic workshops. A full list of the 2025 trainings, as well as upcoming training sessions in 2026, can be found here: https://www.rcac.purdue.edu/training

Aside from training events, RCAC enabled AI research and education through its Research Software Engineering (RSE) Center. The RSE Center provides end-to-end research software support, from early proposal design and data engineering to development, deployment, visualization, and long-term sustainability. In 2025, the RSE Center provided AI consultation and project support to over 15 faculty and research groups across colleges, including Engineering, Science, Liberal Arts, Health & Human Sciences, Pharmacy, and the Mitch Daniels School of Business. Furthermore, the center contributed to multiple funded and pending grant proposals advancing AI applications in education, research infrastructure, and scientific discovery. The RSE Center is a dedicated AI and research computing resource, ready to help Purdue researchers take their next giant leap. To leverage the RSE Center’s team of AI research scientists and collaborate on a project, please visit: Purdue Center for Research Software Engineering

RCAC support services for AI extend beyond training events and RSE partnerships. Other AI support efforts conducted in 2025 include:

• Hosted hundreds of terabytes of datasets locally to accelerate research on Purdue infrastructure.
• Provided various self-guided AI training materials, detailed notebooks, example code, datasets, and deployment guides, all publicly available through RCAC repositories for asynchronous learning.
• Created extensive documentation for Purdue GenAI Studio covering AI model selection, API access, responsible use guidelines, fine-tuning workflows, and deployment best practices.
• Integrated AI into Purdue curriculum for multiple courses through custom applications. Support for the classroom included generating AI-assisted testing, AI-enhanced simulation, AI-assisted evaluation, creation of practice materials, and AI-enhanced VR networking training systems.

National AI Resource Provider

RCAC’s main AI focus in 2025 was to provide Purdue with a computing ecosystem that would allow the university to become a leader in AI innovation; however, the center also stepped up to fulfill a role in doing the same for the nation.

Anvil, Purdue’s powerful National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded supercomputer, was expanded to support the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot and ACCESS programs. The supercomputer received $5M in supplemental funding to secure advanced GPUs and provide AI support to researchers throughout the United States. Anvil-specific AI upgrades and support efforts in 2025 include:

• Procured and deployed Anvil AI, a new partition housing 84 Nvidia H100 SXM GPUs
• Created a 1PB all-flash object storage for Anvil to support emerging AI storage needs.
• Deployed AI-powered Anvil Notebook service that provides an interactive notebook portal to support instructional and/or lightweight research needs
• Continually developed AnvilGPT, the “Purdue GenAI Studio” available for Anvil users nationwide.

Anvil and Anvil AI are available to researchers via two pathways: 1) the ACCESS allocations process, and 2) the NAIRR allocations process. More information about Anvil is available on Purdue’s Anvil website. Anyone with questions should contact anvil@purdue.edu.

Looking Ahead

While 2025 was an extraordinarily productive year for AI and generative AI initiatives at RCAC, there is no intent to slow down. The Spring 2026 semester will feature the continuation of monthly AI training workshops running January through May. Also, multiple major grant proposals are pending that would significantly expand AI research infrastructure, educational applications, and cross-institutional collaborations.

Planned initiatives for 2026 include expanding GenAI Studio's model catalog, deploying advanced agentic AI capabilities, launching the SciAgents research program for AI-assisted scientific discovery, scaling course-integrated AI applications to thousands of additional students, and continuing to build Purdue's national leadership in responsible, institution-hosted generative AI infrastructure. Beyond these initiatives, RCAC will also continue to educate students and researchers by delivering numerous AI-focused trainings and workshops, including the NSF NAIRR Regional AI Workshop, happening May 20-22 in Indianapolis, Indiana, as well as the Purdue AI Research Showcase, hosted in conjunction with Purdue’s Institute for Physical AI and taking place April 14–15, 2026 on the Purdue University West Lafayette campus.

To stay apprised of upcoming AI-related news and training, please subscribe to our RCAC newsletter. For more information on our AI and data science services, please visit our AI and Data Science page.

RCAC operates the centrally-maintained research computing resources at Purdue University, providing access to leading-edge computational and data storage systems as well as expertise and support to Purdue faculty, staff, and student researchers. To learn more about HPC and how RCAC can help you, please visit: https://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ or reach out to rcac-help@purdue.edu to request consultation.

Anvil is funded under NSF award No. 2005632.

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu

The 90-minute event took place on Friday, March 6th, at RCAC’s Envision Center. Hosted in conjunction with the Black Cultural Center (BCC), the Native American Educational and Cultural Center (NAECC), and the LGBTQ Center, the session centered around open discussion between audience and panelist members as they shared their lived experiences and observations of double standards in classrooms, labs, research groups, and campus life. The panel speakers included undergraduate and graduate students Gemma Nicole Doner, Xavier Amari Gardner, Alyssa Alexandria Nez, and Madiha Fathima, as well as moderator and RCAC staff member Suzanna Gardner.

Throughout the event, the panelists discussed their experiences both at Purdue and abroad, offering insight, advice, and hope to members of marginalized groups, as well as understanding and education for attendees who may not have faced bias or double standards in the workplace. The open discussion format stoked audience engagement and ultimately led to a highly impactful event for all involved.

“Attending the WHPC event provided me with a crucial opportunity to build my network of folks using high-performance computing resources in their work,” says Dr. Ali Bramson, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at Purdue and head of the Bramson Research Lab. “I felt a strong sense of belonging during the event that can often be hard to find in the workplace. I now know that I am part of this community, and I am excited to continue to get more involved. The event gave me a space to connect with people who have had very similar and very different experiences from me, and I learned a lot through the format and everyone’s contributions. It has helped me build my network across campus and research disciplines outside my own. I look forward to seeing where these new connections take me and my work!”

Lunch was provided for all attendees during the workshop and panel discussion. RCAC would like to thank Aztlan Combat Sports, a woman-owned business based in Lafayette, Indiana, for generously sponsoring this event.

Purdue Women in High-Performance Computing Program

Purdue Women in HPC is part of a broader engagement initiative by the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) and is led by women staffers affiliated with RCAC. WHPC is a dedicated community encompassing undergraduate, graduate, staff, and faculty men and women who are interested in exposing women to high-performance computing and encouraging their pursuit of research and careers in HPC and other technology fields.

Within the WHPC initiative, RCAC provides partial travel assistance to undergraduate and graduate students, empowering their participation in various national conferences that align with WHPC’s objectives. The WHPC travel scholarship sends students to numerous conferences each year, most recently including the Grace Hopper Celebration, Society of Women Engineers, and Supercomputing.

For full eligibility requirements, and to apply for this scholarship, please visit the WHPC Scholarship page.

In addition to the scholarship program, Purdue WHPC organizes a range of activities, including regular meetings to discuss technical HPC-related issues of interest, opportunities to network with the WHPC community, a mentorship program, workshops, and exposure to external resources and opportunities.

If you would like to attend and/or are interested in future participation, please contact us at whpc@purdue.edu. You may also subscribe to our WHPC List Serve.

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu

Pegasus is a tool to help workflow-based applications function in various environments, including desktops, cloud, and high-performance computing (HPC) systems. It was designed to allow scientists to construct workflows in abstract terms and remove the need to understand the underlying execution environment. Pegasus has been used successfully in a number of scientific fields: astronomy, bioinformatics, earthquake science, gravitational-wave physics, ecology, and cryo-EM, amongst others. A workflow in Pegasus consists of multiple tasks with defined dependencies, and Pegasus handles job submission, data staging, execution ordering, and failure recovery. Some beneficial features of Pegasus include:

• Data Management: Pegasus handles data transfers, input data selection, and output registration.
• Automated Error Recovery and Reliability: Errors are automatically addressed by retrying tasks, workflow-level checkpointing, re-mapping, and trying alternative data sources for data staging.
• Adaptability and Reuse: Pegasus works in a variety of distributed computing environments, and workflows can easily be run in different environments without alteration.
• Scalability: Pegasus can scale both the size of the workflow and the resources the workflow is distributed over without impacting performance.

Pegasus is deployed on Anvil through the Anvil Notebook Service, which provides browser-based access to Jupyter Notebooks running on Anvil infrastructure. The Pegasus Notebook environment includes the Pegasus workflow management system, HTCondor for workflow execution management, and preconfigured integration with Anvil’s SLURM scheduler. This environment allows users to develop and debug workflows interactively using the Pegasus Python API or command-line tools, submit workflows to Anvil’s batch system using their allocations, and monitor workflow execution and logs directly from the notebook interface. No additional Pegasus installation or configuration is required by the user.

To learn more about Pegasus and how to access it on Anvil, please visit: Pegasus on Anvil

Anvil is one of Purdue University’s most powerful supercomputers, providing researchers from diverse backgrounds with advanced computing capabilities. Built through a $10 million system acquisition grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Anvil supports scientific discovery by providing resources through the NSF’s Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS), a program that serves tens of thousands of researchers across the United States. Anvil also supports advanced artificial intelligence research as an official resource provider of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot.

Researchers may request access to Anvil via the ACCESS allocations process or through the NAIRR allocations process. More information about Anvil is available on Purdue’s Anvil website. Anyone with questions should contact anvil@purdue.edu. Anvil is funded under NSF award No. 2005632.

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu

This event, the Purdue AI Research Showcase, is taking place April 14–15, 2026 on the Purdue University West Lafayette campus.

Event Focus

The Purdue AI Research Showcase is designed as a research‑centered AI showcase, highlighting:

• AI‑related research and applications across all corners of campus
• Cross‑disciplinary collaborations and emerging research partnerships
• Opportunities for Purdue researchers, students, and industry partners to connect and share work

This event will highlight Purdue’s AI research strengths and foster deeper, more targeted collaboration with industry partners interested in research engagement related to AI.

What to Expect

Participants can expect a dynamic environment for building connections, raising awareness of available expertise, and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration across Purdue’s AI ecosystem, including:

• Keynotes and panel discussions from leading experts
• Research demonstrations and displays from Purdue’s leading research centers and institutes advancing AI technologies and applications
• Student poster session
• Hands‑on workshops
• Campus AI resources showcase

Poster Session Callout

During the Purdue AI Research Showcase, IPAI and RCAC will be hosting a poster session. We are calling on all Purdue researchers to submit your posters today! For more information on the poster sessiojn, and to register, please visit our Student Poster Session Callout.

Additional details about the program, registration, and opportunities to participate will be shared in the coming weeks. To stay apprised of all Purdue AI Research Showcase information, please subscribe to our RCAC newsletter.

Dates and Location

📅 April 14–15, 2026

📍 Fowler Hall and Stewart Center, Purdue University, West Lafayette campus

The Beyond the Algorithm Challenge was designed by the NASA Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) to propel scientific discovery for complex Earth Science problems—in this case, rapid flood analysis—by encouraging the exploration of unconventional and innovative computing methods. Specifically, the ESTO wanted participants to utilize technologies such as quantum computing, quantum machine learning, neuromorphic computing, or in-memory computing, which have all shown promise in overcoming limitations of conventional computing methods. By testing these novel computing methods, the Beyond the Algorithm Challenge paves the way for transforming how Earth Science problems are solved, potentially improving the lives and safety of the American people.

The SECQUOIA group is a Purdue University research organization within the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering. Led by Dr. David Bernal, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, the SECQUOIA group focuses on designing and implementing optimization algorithms using hybrid and cutting-edge hardware technologies, including quantum computing technologies. Upon learning about the Beyond the Algorithm Challenge, Bernal felt that the competition aligned well with SECQUOIA’s work and immediately began assembling a team. Team members for the challenge included: Dr. Bernal, Yirang Park, PhD student in Chemical Engineering; Alan Yi, sophomore in Computer Science; and Daniel Anoruo, senior in Computer Science with a cybersecurity focus from Towson University.

Over the course of 10 weeks, the group designed and refined QUAFFLE (Quantum U-Net Assisted Federated Flood Learning and Estimation). QUAFFLE is a hybrid modeling framework that combines Quantum U-Nets for image segmentation with federated learning, a machine learning approach that decentralizes the training process. To understand the reasoning behind QUAFFLE requires a rudimentary understanding of these architectures and techniques.

U-Net architecture is a tried-and-true convolutional neural network (CNN) used for pixel-level image segmentation. The name stems from the fact that when drawn, the architecture takes the shape of a “U.” U-Nets take images and identify specific objects within those images. The resulting accuracy of the U-Net model correlates with how well it was trained.

Federated learning is a technique in which a global model is collaboratively trained across multiple devices or servers, each of which has its own local model. One of the benefits of federated learning is that each local model can handle a specific type of data—ideal for tasks that involve analyzing dissimilar data. The performance of the global model is improved in this scenario by producing higher-quality training results on smaller, distributed datasets rather than relying on less robust results from one large, centralized dataset.

For the Beyond the Algorithm Challenge, the SECQUOIA group wanted to create a system that was capable of producing accurate flood maps. The group theorized that harnessing the power of quantum computing combined with federated learning would allow for this while improving speed, security, and efficiency, compared to traditional computing methods.

A major obstacle for the group was mismatched datasets. The flood maps would need to be based on all available imagery, which includes images of differing regions, sizes, and sources (LiDAR, drone, satellite, weather radar, etc).

“One of the main challenges we had with this specific application was that there's a lot of heterogeneity in the data,” says Yirang Park. “To overcome this, we implemented federated learning under a heterogeneous-client setting, where each client trained locally on a random subset of the data and contributed model updates to a shared QUAFFLE model, improving speed and accuracy.”

Another issue the group faced in this challenge is the computational intensity required for flood detection. The very large, heterogeneous datasets needed for the task means that there is a significant amount of training parameters. More training parameters equals more computing power and longer computing times. To combat this, the group decided to replace the bottleneck layers in the U-Net architecture (the layers forming the bottom of the “U”) with quantum layers. The idea was that this would help reduce the number of training parameters required, thus reducing the training time and increasing learning efficiency.

“We theorized that if we needed fewer training parameters, we could speed up the training process,” says Daniel Anoruo. “Replacing the bottleneck with quantum-based architecture allowed us to do that while simultaneously improving feature extraction.”

The final challenge for the group was one of access and scarcity. For now, quantum computers are rare and few researchers are allocated computing time on the machines. The SECQUOIA group used the Anvil supercomputer to solve this problem by simulating two types of quantum computers: a gate-based system (with PennyLane software) and a photonic-based system (with ORCA-SDK software). The benefits of using a powerful supercomputer like Anvil to simulate a quantum computing system were manyfold: the researchers tested and refined QUAFFLE on a computing system they had access to, validated their approach for potential future use on different types of quantum systems, and bypassed the long process of obtaining an allocation on a quantum computer just to test an unproven (at the time) software framework.

“Running these simulations on Anvil gave us an advantage in the sense that we know QUAFFLE is hardware agnostic,” says Park. “There are multiple types of quantum computers, and no one knows which one will be the system, but we do know that QUAFFLE can adapt to different hardware architectures.”

Park continues, “Having a working code that has been proven in simulations and can adapt to various quantum systems has also allowed us to de-risk the approach. We know that we haven’t built something only to find that we’ve wasted time and resources after implementing it on precious quantum resources.”

The SECQUOIA group was thrilled with Anvil’s performance.

“Anvil really saved us,” says Alan Yi. “We tried testing these simulations on our local computers, and they would run for two days and not be done. But with Anvil GPUs, the simulation would finish really quickly, sometimes even less than an hour.”

After completing their work, the group had demonstrated that QUAFFLE was a success—it required 6% fewer parameters and outperformed a centralized quantum U-Net in accuracy when combining different data sources. Their innovative approach led to them securing a position as a finalist in the Beyond the Algorithm Challenge. While they did not ultimately receive the grand prize in the competition, the team’s work stood out for its innovation and real-world potential. QUAFFLE earned recognition from the judges as a promising solution, and the project gained valuable support from industry leaders, including Rigetti, Orca UK Computing, Flower, and IBM. The team plans to continue expanding QUAFFLE, and hopes to someday test it on an actual quantum system.

For more information about the SECQUOIA group, please visit: https://secquoia.github.io. The group’s presentation given to NASA for the Beyond the Algorithm Challenge can be viewed here: https://www.nasa-beyond-challenge.org/project-gallery/secquoia

To learn more about High-Performance Computing and how it can help you, please visit our “Why HPC?” page.

Anvil is one of Purdue University’s most powerful supercomputers, providing researchers from diverse backgrounds with advanced computing capabilities. Built through a $10 million system acquisition grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Anvil supports scientific discovery by providing resources through the NSF’s Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS), a program that serves tens of thousands of researchers across the United States.

Researchers may request access to Anvil via the ACCESS allocations process. More information about Anvil is available on Purdue’s Anvil website. Anyone with questions should contact anvil@purdue.edu. Anvil is funded under NSF award No. 2005632.

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu

Paridha Talmale is a Master’s student at Purdue, majoring in Engineering Management. Last October, thanks to assistance from a WHPC scholarship, Talmale attended WE25, an annual international conference hosted by the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). Founded in 1950, SWE is a global STEM community dedicated to empowering women in the field of engineering. We sat down with Talmale after she attended WE25 to discuss the conference and learn about her experiences whilst there:

Can you describe your overall experience at the conference?

Attending the SWE Conference has always been an incredibly inspiring and empowering experience for me. Being surrounded by thousands of women engineers, leaders, and innovators created a strong sense of community and belonging. I had the opportunity to attend sessions on leadership, innovation, and emerging technologies, as well as connect with professionals from top companies. Beyond the technical learning, I found it motivating to hear personal career stories that reflected resilience, creativity, and purpose. The environment was both energetic and inclusive, reinforcing my passion for engineering management and my goal of combining technical problem-solving with strategic leadership.

What was your biggest takeaway from the conference?

My biggest takeaway was the importance of networking with intention and authenticity. Through meaningful conversations with professionals in the fields of technology, manufacturing, and energy, I gained valuable insights into different career paths and how leadership in engineering is evolving with AI and sustainability. The career fair also helped me better understand what companies value in candidates beyond technical expertise. Skills like adaptability, communication, and systems thinking stood out as critical for long-term success. Overall, the conference strengthened my vision of contributing to innovation in technology by working along with diverse, collaborative teams.

Did you have any fun or exciting experiences outside the planned conference sessions?

Apart from the conference sessions, I took some time to explore the city of New Orleans. I enjoyed Italian cuisine with fellow Purdue MEM attendees at Italian Pie, tried the city’s signature beignets at Café Beignet, and explored iconic locations such as Caesars Casino and Bourbon Street, which added a memorable cultural experience to the trip.

Has your experience led you to consider future involvement in research computing or HPC, either as a field of study, a career path, or a member of the community?

Yes, this experience has encouraged me to consider future involvement in research computing and high-performance computing (HPC). Exposure to the scale, impact, and collaborative nature of HPC highlighted how critical these systems are in enabling data-driven research and complex problem-solving across domains. As a Master’s student in Engineering Management with a strong interest in technology and analytics, I see value in engaging with the HPC community, whether through applied projects, interdisciplinary collaboration, or roles that bridge technical teams with strategy and operations. This experience has broadened my perspective on how HPC can align with my long-term career interests.

How did support from Purdue WHPC make this experience possible for you, and how do you feel about receiving the support?

The support from Purdue WHPC was instrumental in making this experience possible. Without their assistance, attending such a large national conference might not have been feasible for me this year. It was not just their financial support, but it acted like a golden ticket that allowed me to fully immerse myself in the sessions, networking events, and the career fair without any added stress. I am genuinely grateful for their encouragement and commitment to empowering women in engineering and computing. This experience not only expanded my professional network but also deepened my sense of belonging in a community that uplifts and supports women pursuing technical leadership roles.

Would you recommend the WHPC scholarship program to other Purdue students and why?

Yes, I would wholeheartedly recommend the WHPC scholarship program to other Purdue students. The program not only provides financial support to attend transformative events like the SWE Conference but also connects students to a broader network of women in technology and research computing. WHPC provides financial support to various other conferences and events as well. It’s an excellent opportunity for students to gain exposure to emerging fields, engage with leaders in STEM, and develop both technical and professional skills. Beyond funding, WHPC’s mission of empowering women in high-performance computing and related disciplines fosters confidence and encourages students to take active roles in advancing diversity and innovation in engineering.

Would you please describe any prior involvement with Research Computing and/or WHPC?

Although I have not directly worked with Purdue’s Research Computing team or at the Envision Center, I have applied computational and analytical tools extensively in both academic and professional settings. My experience includes using Python, SQL, and simulation platforms like Arena to analyze data, model systems, and optimize processes, skills that align closely with high-performance and data-intensive computing. Currently, through my operations optimization experience with Panasonic Energy, I work on data-driven problem-solving and process improvement initiatives. This involves analyzing manufacturing performance metrics, identifying inefficiencies, and using computational models to optimize workflows that bridge engineering principles with analytics and operations research.

I became involved with Purdue Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) when I applied for their scholarship to attend the SWE Conference, and I see this as the beginning of a longer-term engagement. The organization’s mission to empower women in computing strongly resonates with me, and I hope to contribute by promoting awareness of computational and analytical tools among interdisciplinary engineering students, especially those in management and applied engineering fields.

Purdue Women in High-Performance Computing Program

Purdue Women in HPC is part of a broader engagement initiative by the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) and is led by women staffers affiliated with RCAC. WHPC is a dedicated community encompassing undergraduate, graduate, staff, and faculty men and women who are interested in exposing women to high-performance computing and encouraging their pursuit of research and careers in HPC and other technology fields.

Within the WHPC initiative, RCAC provides partial travel assistance to undergraduate and graduate students, empowering their participation in various national conferences that align with WHPC’s objectives. The WHPC travel scholarship sends students to numerous conferences each year, most recently including the Grace Hopper Celebration, Society of Women Engineers, and Supercomputing.

For full eligibility requirements, and to apply for this scholarship, please visit the WHPC Scholarship page.

In addition to the scholarship program, Purdue WHPC organizes a range of activities, including regular meetings to discuss technical HPC-related issues of interest, opportunities to network with the WHPC community, a mentorship program, workshops, and exposure to external resources and opportunities.

If you would like to attend and/or are interested in future participation, please contact us at whpc@purdue.edu. You may also subscribe to our WHPC List Serve.

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu

Can you introduce yourself and share a little about who you are? Hello! My name is Nathan Whitacre and I’m a senior working at RCAC as a student programmer.

What are some of your main interests or passions? Some of my interests include video game development, learning Spanish, and listening to EDM.

Can you tell us about your role at RCAC? What does your job entail? I am a Student Programmer at the Envision Center, where I create applications and solutions for our clients that normally involve computer vision or data visualization technology. I’ve also organized several game jam events on behalf of the Envision Center and SIGGD, a game development club here at Purdue.

What do you enjoy most about working at RCAC? I love the people and culture at the Envision Center. I’ve gotten the opportunity to learn so much from the awesome people that I work with, and they really make me feel at home there. It’s also just super cool that not only do I get to learn new technologies and skills, but I get to use what I learn to make things that provide real value to people.

Tell us more about your favorite project you like to show off!

Project title: SIGGD's "Echoes of Isovios: A Legacy Undone"

Project description: Echoes of Isovios is an action-packed story-driven roguelite game with a supernatural twist: You can let ghosts of the past possess you to gain their unique game-changing abilities. In the game, you play as Orion, a tyrant who has driven humanity to extinction using the mythical sword, Isovios. After eons of isolation, you are granted the power to go back in time and right your wrongs at three distinct points in history, each taking place at a pivotal moment of your tyrannical reign. Echoes of Isovios was developed over the course of a year by Purdue ACM’s Special Interest Group for Game Development (SIGGD).

What did you learn from this project? This project took a diverse team of very talented people to complete, including programmers, gameplay designers, artists, composers, audio producers, writers, and voice actors. I was the lead gameplay designer for the project, so along the way I learned many skills required for managing a project of larger scope and collaborating on a multidisciplinary team. The biggest lesson I took away from this project is that, on large teams, communication is everything. Having more people working on a project can lead to increased productivity, but only if everyone on the team is on the same page. Making sure everyone on the team is on the same page is so important for making these large-scale projects work. When they do work, it’s the coolest thing to be a part of.

Did you get to showcase this anywhere?
We were able to showcase a demo of the project at Fractal 2025, a student-run CGT expo, and the game is available to play on SIGGD’s website at https://purduesiggd.github.io. The game will soon be released in an updated state on Steam!

Dark matter is elusive. We don’t know what it is or what it is composed of. This mysterious material scoffs at the adage “Seeing is believing”—it does not interact with the electromagnetic force, meaning it neither absorbs, reflects, nor emits light of any kind. We literally cannot see it, yet we know it is there. Dark matter has mass, thereby exerting the effects of gravity on visible matter. It is only by observing these gravitational effects that scientists know dark matter exists. In fact, dark matter accounts for roughly 85% of all matter in the universe, serving as a cosmic scaffolding that organizes galaxies at scale. Without it, galaxies would have long ago been torn asunder by their own rotational velocities, lacking the necessary gravitational pull required to hold together.

As one can imagine, studying a material that can’t be seen but whose effects must be observed through a telescope can be tricky. For decades, scientists have tackled this problem by running cosmological simulations that include dark matter and comparing them to what is actually seen in the universe. If the end result of a simulation matches the physical reality seen through the telescope, then that’s a good sign that the scientists are on the right track with their theories. If not, the theory must be altered or dismissed entirely. Recent technological advances have enabled scientists to study dark matter in greater depth than ever before. High-performance computing (HPC) systems provide an astonishing amount of computing power, while the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) gives astronomers an unprecedented view of the universe, enabling observations of the first stars and formation of the first galaxies after the Big Bang. This boost in data-gathering ability and computing performance lies at the heart of the dark matter research being conducted at UCLA.

Claire Williams is a PhD student in the Astronomy and Astrophysics Division of the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy. Williams’s focus is on theoretical astrophysics. She is part of the Supersonic Project, a collaboration that studies how stream velocity and dark matter affected galaxy formation in the early universe. In this instance, stream velocity refers to the relative velocity of baryons and dark matter during the early formation stages of the universe. The stream velocity has been largely neglected in traditional simulations of galaxy formation. However, recent findings show that the stream velocity was supersonic, which had major implications for how the baryons and dark matter were distributed. Williams’s, and the rest of the research group’s, goal is to improve our understanding of the galaxy formation process by including the stream velocity as a factor in their cosmological simulations.

“So our specific studies are trying to gain a more precise understanding of the process by including effects that previously nobody included,” says Williams. “People already had dark matter, they already had gas, but they were missing the stream velocity. It has been largely ignored because it is challenging to get right in simulations. But neglecting the fact that material was moving past the dark matter at five times the speed of sound inevitably leads to a different result. What our group has done is to run simulations that correctly include the relative motion of dark matter and ordinary matter at early times in the universe.”

Williams and her research group utilize the Anvil supercomputer to run high-resolution AREPO hydrodynamics simulations for a number of different studies. The common theme across these studies is that the group runs theoretical simulations both with and without stream velocity as a factor, and that the results are, or will soon be, compared with JWST observations. The size of the regions being simulated are, quite literally, astronomical, ranging upwards of two megaparsecs. This equates to a volume slightly larger than the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies combined. The simulations are also incredibly detailed, with each individual particle representing an area roughly 200 times the mass of our sun. For comparison, that’s a single grain of sand on the beach. Simulations this large require a massive amount of computing power and would be impossible without HPC resources like Anvil.

“So we're simulating a region larger than the whole Milky Way, but our individual pieces that are moving around are only a couple 100 times bigger than our own sun,” says Williams. “This is why we need Anvil, because you couldn't run this on your laptop. This takes a couple of weeks to run on the cluster.”

Running the simulations is only the first part of the process; HPC resources are further needed to actually analyze the data. Williams continues:

“Then, at the end of the day, when you finish your simulation run, you basically have a bunch of imaginary particles in an imaginary box. But you have to figure out, ‘How would these particles translate to light that the telescope would see?’ So you need to post-process the simulations, which involves extensive data analysis and specialized algorithms to convert the resulting particles into light in space. We need Anvil for this data analysis as well.”

The end result of the group’s computational work is a theoretical picture of what the universe should look like to us today, as viewed through the JWST. Dark matter was dispersed throughout the universe soon after the Big Bang, unaffected by the forces of electricity and magnetism. The gravitational pull of dark matter led to clumps of particles, which eventually formed into galaxies. And the precise placement of these galaxies was likely influenced directly by the stream velocity. At least, that’s Williams’s hypothesis. Now, the research group must wait to see if it proves true.

“So one of the things that we have found with our studies,” says Williams, “is that the stream velocity should cause some very faint galaxies to shine very brightly for a brief period of time at the beginning of the early universe, because it causes them to form a bunch of stars all at once. Without the stream velocity factored in, you wouldn’t expect to see this happen. And now they're starting to make observations with the JWST that should show what we predict to see. So, hopefully, in the next few years, we can get confirmation from the telescope that this effect is happening.”

Williams continues, “One thing that's kind of cool is that if they don't see that effect, then it poses a big problem for dark matter in general, because all of our models so far are dependent on how we think dark matter should work. So if we make this prediction and the telescope doesn't see it, then we know we've messed up our collective understanding of dark matter along the way and may need to make changes to things we thought we had a grasp on in our cosmology.”

For more information about William’s research, please visit her UCLA Bio Page. More details on the Supersonic Project can be found here: The Supersonic Project

Interested in leveraging the latest advancements in computing to bolster your research? Please visit our “Why HPC?” page to learn more about High-Performance Computing and how it can help you.

Anvil is one of Purdue University’s most powerful supercomputers, providing researchers from diverse backgrounds with advanced computing capabilities. Built through a $10 million system acquisition grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Anvil supports scientific discovery by providing resources through the NSF’s Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS), a program that serves tens of thousands of researchers across the United States.

Researchers may request access to Anvil via the ACCESS allocations process. More information about Anvil is available on Purdue’s Anvil website. Anyone with questions should contact anvil@purdue.edu. Anvil is funded under NSF award No. 2005632.

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu

Shalini Kumari is a Master’s student at Purdue, majoring in Engineering Management. Last November, thanks to assistance from a WHPC scholarship, Kumari attended GHC 25. GHC, eponymously named after pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper, is the world’s largest gathering of women in tech, bringing together thousands of women from across the globe to learn, network, and celebrate their achievements. We sat down with Kumari afterwards to discuss the conference and learn about her experiences whilst there:

Can you describe your overall experience at the conference?

GHC felt like stepping into a space buzzing with possibility. Everywhere I turned, there were women building, leading, and lifting each other up. It was inspiring in a way that stayed with me long after the sessions ended.

What was your biggest takeaway from the conference?

When women come together, something shifts, confidence grows, barriers feel lighter, and the future feels a little more in reach. Being surrounded by thousands of talented women reminded me that leadership in tech isn’t just something to aspire to; it’s something women are actively shaping right now. I met so many inspiring people and attended sessions like Aditi Patange’s “Code to Strategy: Transitioning from SWE to PM,” which made me realize that there are others with backgrounds like mine carving similar paths. It was grounding and motivating in the best way.

How did support from Purdue WHPC make this experience possible for you, and how do you feel about receiving the support?

The support from Purdue WHPC genuinely changed what this experience looked like for me. It made attending GHC possible and allowed me to focus on learning, connecting, and exploring new career paths with an open mind. I’m deeply grateful; it felt like having a team behind me, cheering me on. Would you recommend the WHPC scholarship program to other Purdue students and why? Absolutely! The WHPC scholarship doesn’t just help you attend a conference, it gives you access to a community that pushes you to grow, learn, and imagine bigger possibilities for yourself. It’s an opportunity I hope more Purdue students take advantage of.

Did you have any prior involvement with Research Computing or WHPC?

This was my first time engaging with WHPC. It was a wonderful introduction, and I’m excited to stay connected moving forward!

Purdue Women in High-Performance Computing Program

Purdue Women in HPC is part of a broader engagement initiative by the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) and is led by women staffers affiliated with RCAC. WHPC is a dedicated community encompassing undergraduate, graduate, staff, and faculty men and women who are interested in exposing women to high-performance computing and encouraging their pursuit of research and careers in HPC and other technology fields.

Within the WHPC initiative, RCAC provides partial travel assistance to undergraduate and graduate students, empowering their participation in various national conferences that align with WHPC’s objectives. The WHPC travel scholarship sends students to numerous conferences each year, most recently including the Grace Hopper Celebration, Society of Women Engineers, and Supercomputing.

For full eligibility requirements, and to apply for this scholarship, please visit the WHPC Scholarship page.

In addition to the scholarship program, Purdue WHPC organizes a range of activities, including regular meetings to discuss technical HPC-related issues of interest, opportunities to network with the WHPC community, a mentorship program, workshops, and exposure to external resources and opportunities.

If you would like to attend and/or are interested in future participation, please contact us at whpc@purdue.edu. You may also subscribe to our WHPC List Serve.

Dr. Ziran Wang is an Assistant Professor of the Lyle School of Civil and Construction Engineering and leads the Purdue Digital Twin Lab. He recently worked with the Envision Center, a group within RCAC’s Research Software Engineering (RSE) Center, on an INDOT project aimed at improving driver understanding and acceptance at innovative intersection designs within the state of Indiana.

Intersections can be challenging for drivers. Traditional signalized and two way stop control intersections present right angle conflicts that sometimes result in poor safety performance. According to the U.S. Federal Highway Administration, roughly one-quarter of traffic fatalities and one-half of traffic injuries occur at intersections. Of course, intersecting roadways are unavoidable and quite necessary. So to reduce the risk of intersection accidents, a nationwide push for new, thoughtful intersection designs has led to the development of “innovative intersections.” Innovative intersections are designed to enhance safety and improve traffic flow by reducing or modifying conflict points—locations where the paths of two or more road users intersect—within an intersection. There are numerous types of innovative intersections that have proven to reduce accidents and fatalities, yet very few of these novel designs have been integrated into our roadways. The problem is inherent to the solution itself: new designs are unfamiliar to drivers, leading to unease, confusion, and public resistance. To help ease this general discountenance of innovative intersections, Wang wanted to develop a driving simulator for INDOT that would allow the general population, as well as key policymakers, to experience proposed intersection designs in a risk-free setting.

“Innovative intersections are a proven solution,” says Wang, “but getting the public at large to accept them as well as learn to use them appropriately is a challenge. Our goal is to meet this challenge by giving people a chance to experience these intersections without having to be driving at speed on the roadway.”

Wang reached out to the Envision Center for help with this project. Together, the team developed the “Portable Driving Simulation Platform.” This platform is a Unity game engine-based simulator that provides an immersive, interactive environment for users to try out new intersection designs without ever having to set foot inside a vehicle.

The Portable Driving Simulator Platform involves five kinds of innovative intersections: a displaced left turn (DLT), a reduced-conflict intersection (RCI), a diverging diamond interchange (DDI), two-lane roundabouts (RAB), and roundabout interchanges (RBI). Three-dimensional maps of these five intersection types were developed by the team, as well as multiple car models and both first-person and third-person viewpoints for users to experience. The group also implemented traffic signals and collision avoidance algorithms into the simulator.

“This was a fun, collaborative project,” says George Takahashi, Principal Visualization Scientist at the Envision Center. “We [the Envision Center] focused our efforts on developing the environment and 3D work design, while Dr. Wang and his graduate student, Luyang Jiang, worked on the driving mechanics, vehicle behavior, and simulation programming. Thanks to this shared development, we now have a solid foundation to build upon new driving scenarios and explore more collaboration opportunities in the future.”

Now that the first iteration of the Portable Driving Simulation Platform has proven successful, the group intends to further enhance the simulator for INDOT. Future work plans include integrating steering wheel and paddle user controls and overall optimization and beautification, to make it feel as realistic as possible. Eventually, Wang would like to see this platform used across Indiana with widespread deployment at BMV branches, and as a fundamental testing platform for traffic analysis.

“This collaboration with the Envision Center has totally revolutionized the way we conduct digital twin research. We used to spend much time identifying appropriate off-the-shelf platforms for conducting simulation studies on intelligent transportation systems, and now we can build our own easily with a proven pipeline. ”

To learn more about Dr. Wang’s research, please visit his website: https://ziranw.github.io/

The Purdue Center for Research Software Engineering (the RSE center) is a university-approved center within the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing. Its official establishment recognizes the increasingly vital role that software plays in all fields of scientific research, and formalizes RCAC’s software engineering efforts at RCAC to better support research at Purdue. The RSE center’s mission is to help accelerate research and increase its impact through the creation of innovative, robust, and sustainable research software.

The Envision Center is a team within the RSE Center dedicated to assisting, supporting, and collaborating with faculty, students, and industry in scientific visualization, virtual and augmented reality, and media creation. The center’s staff and student employees work with faculty partners and external clients to create virtual reality (VR) and data visualization tools for research and educational use. The center also collaborates on grant proposals and develops promotional media, such as publication-quality stills and animated videos. For more information on the Envision Center, please visit their Main Page. To see other projects the Envision Center has taken on, you can visit their Project Showcase.

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu

Year: Sophomore

Major: Electrical Engineering

Position: Assistant Computational Researcher

Can you introduce yourself and share a little about who you are? Hello! My name is Elian and I’m an Assistant Researcher!

What are some of your main interests or passions? Some of my interests include Linux, servers, and drinking lots of coffee.

Can you tell us about your role at RCAC? What does your job entail? I am an Assistant Researcher handling tickets from researchers and the entire user base of multiple RCAC clusters, including Anvil and Gautschi. I also help the Apps team to cover issues facing the clusters.

What do you enjoy most about working at RCAC? Working at RCAC allowed me to handle servers on a day-to-day basis and, other than the fact that I'm a huge server nerd, it allowed me to learn more about Linux systems in a very friendly work environment.

Tell us more about your favorite project you like to show off!

Project title: Handling Apps tickets at RCAC

Project description: I handle tickets from the wide range of users that Purdue's multiple clusters cover and support. Whenever issues arise, I would be one of the first people to handle the ticket then I'd handle their issues, noting whatever arises in RCAC's database.

What did you learn from this project? A lot of patience, especially from (slightly, and understandably) upset researchers who thought they had lost their life's work (thankfully they hadn’t!).

Dr. Iman Haqiqi is Lead Research Economist in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University. His research leverages high-performance computing (HPC) resources to study international trade, environmental, and resource economics, with a focus on global change and sustainability. Recently, Haqiqi utilized Anvil, one of Purdue’s most powerful supercomputers, to explore how strategic trade partnerships can buffer the risk of crop market volatility stemming from increased heat stress.

Heat stress is a significant concern for crop production. When plants are exposed to excessive heat for prolonged periods, they can exhibit numerous negative health effects, including inhibited growth, reduced photosynthesis rates, sunscald, wilting, and even death. Different crops exhibit varying levels of sensitivity to heat stress, but corn—a staple crop for billions of people—is particularly vulnerable. As extreme heat stress events increase in frequency and intensity, national and global food security is put at risk. Facing this challenge and understanding the effectiveness of alternative strategies to overcome it is precisely what drove Haqiqi to pursue his research.

Climate impact on average crop production has been researched to no end. There are many studies that look at the effects of heat stress or other extreme weather events on average corn yield. The problem, according to Haqiqi, is that looking at the average can be misleading and neglects a large part of the risk.

“A lot of other studies have looked at this problem and determined that, on average, crop production will be a little bit lower,” says Haqiqi. “But I find that looking at the average is misleading. Mixing extreme highs with extreme lows, for example, means that, on average, everything might be fine. What we need to do is study the volatility, because that’s where the real risk is. If we want to prepare, we have to measure the volatility, not just the average.”

While a small decrease in average annual corn yields may not be considered problematic, increased volatility is. Volatility always has been and always will be a factor in crop production. Some years will be worse than others. But as the risk of extreme weather events decimating a crop supply increases, so too does the chance that any particular season will cause the global supply of food, not to mention the agricultural market, to implode. Haqiqi’s goal was to investigate future volatility and risk in corn production associated with increased heat stress, as well as evaluate the effectiveness of two different adaptation strategies—irrigation and market integration.

Irrigation is a tried-and-true method of reducing crop vulnerability during periods of extreme heat. Not only does it cool the temperature of the plant, it also maintains appropriate soil moisture levels, which improves nutrient uptake, photosynthesis rate, and biochemical efficiency. The problem is that wide-scale adoption of irrigation as an adaptation strategy would further deplete an already strained resource—water. This concern over groundwater depletion has led to a growing interest in trade as an alternative option for offsetting crop volatility risk.

International trade partnerships between regions with differing climate patterns could reduce the risk of substantial losses to the national corn supply, but trade as an adaptation strategy had only been discussed in theory. Haqiqi wanted to measure the strategy’s effectiveness quantitatively. To begin, he needed to predict how corn yields would be affected by potential changes to the climate patterns. Haqiqi used a statistical panel model to estimate corn yield response to heat stress and then combined those results with NEX-GDDP-CMIP6 climate data to project future production volatility and risks of substantial yield losses. To assess overall volatility, Haqiqi needed to calculate the extreme heat levels (i.e., not the average) of each day for millions of fields worldwide, aggregate this for each growing season in every region that produces corn, and then aggregate this to determine global corn supply. Haqiqi then converted these from daily to yearly calculations and determined year-on-year changes in volatility. These results were then used to determine the risk of substantial loss of production for each region. Haqiqi also assessed the relative volatility of each region compared to the global market. Once these baseline results were obtained, Haqiqi could simulate multiple scenarios to analyze irrigation and market integration for their ability to reduce these future risks.

The results of Haqiqi’s research were clear: 1) corn yields will experience higher volatility due to increased heat stress; 2) irrigation expansion can offset this risk; 3) trade can also buffer the risk, but without depleting the groundwater supply. The third point is salient—according to the numbers, irrigation in the US will need to rise from 15% of farm land to 50-75% in order to maintain historical risk levels, which is unsustainable.

“So the whole idea of this paper was to show that, yes, there are some temporary solutions, like irrigation, but they are not sustainable,” says Haqiqi. “Something else, like international trade, which is a solution from an economic perspective, can have a similar effect in terms of reducing volatility and risk. But also, it has benefits because you don't need to have a lot of unsustainable use of resources.”

Haqiqi’s research required a massive amount of computing power, and for that, he relied on Anvil. The supercomputer was used for all computational tasks involving yield projection, variability analysis, and risk assessment.

“Without Anvil, this paper would be just a conceptual framework that, hey, you know, trade could be a good thing compared to irrigation,” says Haqiqi. “But we didn't have numerical evidence to support that claim. Now, thanks to having access to Anvil, we could provide that evidence.”

Haqiqi went on to note that the support he received from the Anvil team was exceptional and that because of the quick, comprehensive responses to his support tickets, he was able to rapidly move past any issues he had.

The results of Haqiqi’s research were published in Environmental Research: Food Systems. To view the publication and learn more about the study, please visit: Trade can buffer climate-induced risks and volatilities in crop supply.

To learn more about High-Performance Computing and how it can help you, please visit our “Why HPC?” page.

Anvil is one of Purdue University’s most powerful supercomputers, providing researchers from diverse backgrounds with advanced computing capabilities. Built through a $10 million system acquisition grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Anvil supports scientific discovery by providing resources through the NSF’s Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS), a program that serves tens of thousands of researchers across the United States.

Researchers may request access to Anvil via the ACCESS allocations process. More information about Anvil is available on Purdue’s Anvil website. Anyone with questions should contact anvil@purdue.edu. Anvil is funded under NSF award No. 2005632.

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu

High-performance computing (HPC) resources have proven indispensable for bioinformatics research due to several factors, including the massive size of the datasets used in life sciences, the computing power required for numerous research activities (analyzing DNA sequences for disease-related genes, cryo-EM based 3D reconstruction, etc.), and regulatory requirements. Life scientists have increasingly faced complex HPC environments, workflow tools, and large datasets due to a manifest shift in life sciences research, relying more heavily on sequencing data. And while having access to the computing hardware is essential, it's not enough—researchers also need to know how to use it.

Among various life sciences initiatives led by RCAC staff, RCAC scientists especially elevated support for Bioinformatics. Bioinformatics as a research discipline sits at the crossroads of biology and computer science. Often related to genetics and genomics, though not limited to this subfield, bioinformatics seeks to analyze and interpret biological data, which is typically packaged in large and complex datasets. Headed by Dr. Arun Seetharam, Lead Bioinformatics Scientist at RCAC, the development of the new bioinformatics support services has successfully contributed to broadening awareness and increasing adoption of HPC. Seetharam’s main focus for achieving this goal has been multifold: expand the bioinformatics software catalogue available on RCAC machines, provide world-class training appropriate for bioinformatics researchers and HPC users of all levels, and partner with researchers to enable new cutting-edge research.

“Our goal has been to make advanced bioinformatics accessible to every researcher at Purdue, regardless of their background,” says Seetharam. “Modern genomics workflows only reach their full potential when paired with high-performance computing, so our focus is on giving scientists not just the software, but the confidence and skills to run these analyses efficiently and reproducibly.” Seetharam continues, “Researchers often tell us that the hardest part isn’t the analysis itself, but navigating the tools and computing environments needed to do it well. By expanding our software catalog and building structured, hands-on training, we’re lowering that barrier and helping labs move from raw data to results much more quickly.”

In order to ensure compliance with data management and sharing policies that went into effect in 2025, RCAC deployed the Rossmann compute cluster and storage environment. As a NIST 800-171–aligned research resource, Rossmann features appropriate computing and data environments for research that involves level-3 restricted data, such as data subject to the NIH Genomic Data Sharing (GDS) policy and a spectrum of licensed data. Furthermore, RCAC launched a data management and facilitation service to ensure organized retention of research data, automate workflows, and guarantee researchers reliable access to raw results for current work and future needs.

Thanks to the efforts of several RCAC team members, RCAC now offers a diverse portfolio of Life Sciences Services to Purdue researchers. Some highlights of the team’s accomplishments from 2025 include:

1. Software & infrastructure

• Deployed Rossmann Community Cluster that is optimized for researchers running applications subject to heightened security requirements, such as data subject to the NIH Genomic Data Sharing (GDS) policy and licensed data.
• Launched data management and facilitation to support the Bindley core facilities in establishing data management pipelines to transfer research data to appropriate storage and archival systems.
• Deployed and actively maintain 750+ biocontainer modules across Negishi, Bell, Gautschi, Scholar, and Rossmann clusters.
• Built and deployed specialized environments, including RStudio biocontainer images and CellProfiler OOD applications.
• Provide ongoing workflow enablement and troubleshooting for Nextflow, Snakemake, and nf-core pipelines on RCAC systems.
• Expanded Globus data transfer and sharing tool to include High Assurance collections appropriate for Protected Health Information, Personally Identifiable Information, and Controlled Unclassified Information.

2. Datasets

• Updated iGenomes datasets are available as cluster-wide modules, providing standardized reference genomes for commonly studied species and eliminating the need for users to download or manage their own copies.
• Maintain centrally updated BLAST databases (nr, nt, RefSeq, SwissProt, and related sets) on all clusters to support high-throughput homology searches and downstream annotation workflows

3. Training, workshops & community programs

• Genomics Exchange (Spring 2025): 13 sessions; ~7 attendees/session; 77 cumulative participants.
• Genomics Essentials (Fall 2025): 12 sessions; 10–20 attendees per session; 10 sessions delivered; 100+ total participants.
• RNA-seq Workshop (Nov 20): served a large group of 35 researchers.
• Orientation for Biologists (Oct 16): Introductory HPC training session for 22 new life sciences researchers.

4. Cross-institutional engagement

• Upcoming Midwest Bioinformatics Showcase (Spring 2026), a joint Purdue–Northwestern seminar series highlighting graduate and postdoctoral genomics researchers across the Midwest and fostering cross-institutional dialogue, professional development, and HPC-enabled research. Abstract submissions open through January 16.
• Delivered plenary talk, titled “Responding to NIH Requirements for Controlled-Access Data” at the 2025 Trusted CI NSF Cybersecurity Summit.

5. Campus community building

• RCAC Genomics Discord server, now 50+ members, serving as a centralized communication and support hub for Purdue genomics researchers.
• Proposal support for 7 faculty (NSF, NIH P30/R35/MIRA/R01, NASA), including estimation of cost, consultation on sequencing strategy, workflow feasibility assessments.

6. Documentation & resources

• A newly launched RCAC Bioinformatics Tutorials Site, a comprehensive collection of bioinformatics guides, installation instructions, and RCAC-optimized best-practice workflows.
• RCAC Bioinformatics Resources page, which consolidates current and past workshops, training materials, and community programs.

While 2025 has been extraordinarily productive for the Life Sciences team at RCAC, Seetharam noted that there is no intent to slow down. The new year will usher in a new collection of Genomics Exchange workshops, running January through April. Also on the schedule is the Midwest Bioinformatics Showcase, a joint series between Purdue and Northwestern University, scheduled for the Spring 2026 semester. This seminar series will offer training and presentations led by select bioinformatics speakers from multiple institutions, with a goal of providing researchers the ideas, tools, and instruction they need to make an impact and ignite bioinformatic research in the Midwest region.

“The Midwest Bioinformatics Showcase is an opportunity to highlight emerging researchers and strengthen connections across institutions,” says Seetharam. “By bringing together students, postdocs, and faculty working on genomic and computational projects, we’re creating a space for collaboration that extends well beyond a single seminar series.”

To stay apprised of upcoming life sciences news and trainings, please subscribe to our RCAC newsletter. For more information on our bioinformatics and computational biology services, please visit our Computational Biology Services page.

The Life Sciences Services at Purdue’s RCAC provides expert support for researchers across a broad spectrum of research, including genomics, genetics, and computational biology, and any other data- and/or compute-intensive life sciences research. The team assists with complex biological data analysis, including NGS, transcriptomics, and large-scale data management. Their goal is to equip scientists with the tools and expertise to advance their research and achieve impactful results using advanced computing systems and tools.

RCAC operates all centrally-maintained research computing resources at Purdue University, providing access to leading-edge computational and data storage systems as well as expertise and support to Purdue faculty, staff, and student researchers. To learn more about HPC and how RCAC can help you, please visit: https://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ or reach out to rcac-help@purdue.edu to request consultation.

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu

Year: Senior

Major: Data Analytics, Technologies, and Applications

Position: Research Solutions Engineering Student

Can you introduce yourself and share a little about who you are? Hello! My name is Samuel Gomez, and I’m a Data Analytics student at Purdue University. I’m passionate about using data and technology to solve real-world problems and create meaningful impact. Beyond academics, I’m an active member of the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society, a mentor in SHPE, and someone who enjoys helping others grow. My experiences span IT, data science, and project work across several industries, all of which have shaped my interest in building solutions that are both practical and people focused. Outside of my technical work, I enjoy soccer, the gym, and learning from the diverse communities I’ve been part of.

What are some of your main interests or passions? Some of my main interests include watching movies, playing soccer, going to the gym, and lately getting into running. Outside of school and work, I also enjoy photography and reading books on psychology, they help me learn more about people and spark a lot of my curiosity!

Can you tell us about your role at RCAC? What does your job entail? At RCAC, my role centers on developing and supporting solutions that improve how researchers use Purdue’s high-performance computing systems. Most recently, I designed and built a fully automated live-migration system for virtual machines on the Negishi cluster. This system integrates SLURM job scheduling with QEMU to seamlessly move VMs from node to node before job time limits expire, allowing them to run continuously with zero downtime. I also wrote the full internal documentation and an external white paper explaining the system’s architecture, automation logic, and usage, making it easier for both engineers and future users to understand and adopt the workflow.

What do you enjoy most about working at RCAC? What I enjoy most about working at RCAC is the people and the challenges. The team is incredibly supportive, knowledgeable, and always willing to help, which creates an environment where you’re constantly learning. I also appreciate the opportunity to work on complex, real-world problems that push me to grow technically and think creatively.

Tell us more about your favorite project you like to show off!

Project title: Negishi Recursive Migration System

Project description: My favorite project at RCAC is the automated recursive live-migration system I developed for the Negishi HPC cluster. The goal of the project was to allow virtual machines to run continuously on a cluster that enforces strict SLURM wall time limits. To achieve this, I designed a system that integrates QEMU live migration with SLURM scheduling so a VM can seamlessly “hop” from one compute node to another before its job expires. The system automatically launches new VM instances, monitors job runtimes, triggers full memory-state transfers, and sustains uninterrupted VM uptime across job boundaries.

What did you learn from this project? This project taught me how to design automation that fits within real HPC constraints while remaining reliable, policy-compliant, and user-friendly. I gained experience with QEMU internals, cluster networking, and advanced SLURM job orchestration, as well as how to build systems that can operate entirely without human intervention. I also strengthened my technical writing skills by documenting the full architecture, control flow, and implementation details for both internal engineering use and external audiences.

Did you get to showcase this anywhere? Yes, I will! My work is being shared in two ways:

1. Internal engineering documentation on Purdue RCAC’s GitHub for cluster staff and Research Solutions Engineers.
2. A publicly written white paper that explains the system in accessible terms for researchers, students, and anyone interested in HPC systems design. This will allow others to learn from the project and potentially adopt similar approaches on their own HPC environments.

In late 2024, Purdue unveiled its newest and most powerful supercomputer to date, Gautschi. The Gautschi cluster was designed to provide Purdue researchers with a world-class computing resource capable of driving the university toward its next giant leap. Eponymously named in honor of Walter Gautschi, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Purdue University, the Gautschi supercomputer consists of two partitions—a traditional HPC resource focused on providing next-generation CPUs and a dedicated AI partition containing Nvidia H100 SXM GPUs.

Each year, supercomputers may be entered into benchmark competitions to test different aspects of their performance. For example, when Gautschi debuted in the Fall of 2024, it ranked number 157 on the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers and number 43 on the Green500 list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers. This year, staff at the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) decided to measure Gautschi’s performance on the IO500 and HPL-MxP benchmarks.

The IO500 benchmark has become the standard for measuring HPC storage performance. It consists of five separate workloads to identify performance boundaries for HPC applications. On this year’s list, Gautschi was ranked 20th in the “10 Node Production” category, with a peak read performance of 186.54 GB/second. Only three other US university machines bested it on the benchmark. Gautschi also ranked 194th overall on the full list of IO500 submissions. Gautschi’s storage system is built with DDN’s Exascalar filesystem.

The HPL-MxP mixed-precision benchmark is tailored for testing a machine’s ability to handle artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. It combines testing parameters from the traditional HPL framework, one of the most popular benchmarks in the world, with AI-specific constraints. The HPL-MxP results are released biannually. Gautschi was ranked 27th overall on the November 2025 list, and was the top US university machine listed.

“We are excited to see how Gautschi stacks up against the world’s most powerful systems”, says Preston Smith, Executive Director of the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing in Purdue IT. “I/O performance is critical for AI computing to keep GPUs fed with data, and this benchmark score directly reflects the benefits Purdue researchers will get from using Gautschi. Using mixed-precision arithmetic allows HPC applications to leverage AI-optimized accelerators like GPUs, which use lower precision. Mixed-precision computing uses less power and allows for significant speed-ups, reducing time to science. Gautschi’s HPL-MxP score shows a more than 4x speedup on the same hardware simply by using lower precision arithmetic.”

The Gautschi cluster was built through a partnership with Dell, AMD, DDN, and Nvidia, thanks to support from Purdue Computes and the Institute for Physical AI (IPAI). Purdue researchers may obtain access to the Gautschi system through RCAC’s Community Cluster Program. For more information or to purchase access to Gautschi, please visit our Purchase Page.

RCAC operates the centrally-maintained research computing resources at Purdue University, providing access to leading-edge computational and data storage systems as well as expertise and support to Purdue faculty, staff, and student researchers. To learn more about HPC and how RCAC can help you, please visit: https://www.rcac.purdue.edu/

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu

Dr. Zhigang Feng is a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. He, along with his collaborators hailing from multiple institutions, combined machine learning techniques with economic theory to tackle everyone’s favorite economic subject—taxes.

Taxation is an oft-debated subject for governments worldwide, with different opinions and theories as to what works best for individual countries or locales. How differing taxation strategies affect the economic choices of households in a population is an extraordinarily complex problem to solve. Many models have been developed to try and understand and predict the effects of taxes on the economy, with varying levels of success. Most models fail to account for household heterogeneity in the context of dynamic economic fluctuations. This shortcoming is precisely what Feng and his colleagues set out to remedy.

Research has long shown that household heterogeneity needs to be factored in to accurately model economic behavior and therefore design optimized fiscal policies. However, heterogeneity takes an already complex mathematical problem and adds in an infinite-dimensional object. Feng’s goal was to develop a novel machine learning-based approach that successfully factored in household differences. To do this required a massive amount of computing power due to the curse of dimensionality problem, which is why he and his collaborators turned to Anvil.

"This problem isn’t something traditional numerical methods in the standard economist's toolbox can handle—even with a handful of CPUs using MPI, let alone an average computer," says Feng. "We needed multiple GPUs running in parallel to harness the optimization power of modern AI techniques, and we needed them on demand. We also required a machine with massive memory to store the state of every simulated individual. Thankfully, Anvil was able to provide us with both."

The group utilized both CPUs and the advanced GPUs on Anvil to create a Markov decision process in Wasserstein space. They combined deep neural networks for equilibrium function approximation, a histogram-based distribution approximation, an analytically derived distribution transition kernel, and a modified value and policy iteration with an augmented Lagrangian method, all of which together allowed them to address the problem of infinite dimensions. After developing the new approach, the group also needed to run the model simulations for multiple scenarios, showing the cause-and-effect of different taxation strategies.

Overall the group was very happy with Anvil’s performance. The queue for the GPUs was short, allowing them the access they needed to quickly conduct their research. Feng also noted that anytime the team hit any snags or had issues, they reached out to the Anvil support team and received help promptly. All of this combined enabled the group to efficiently proceed with a project that otherwise would not have been possible.

“To solve these models, we needed Anvil,” says Feng. “There’s no question—without it, this is not something we would have been able to achieve.”

Though the research publication is in its preliminary stages, it shows promising results and will have important implications for policymakers and researchers wanting to design effective fiscal policies. The novel machine learning method developed by Feng and his colleagues is also scalable and can be applied to a wide range of other economic models.

For more information about this project, as well as other research conducted by Dr. Feng, please visit his Research Page.

To learn more about High-Performance Computing and how it can help you, please visit our “Why HPC?” page.

Anvil is one of Purdue University’s most powerful supercomputers, providing researchers from diverse backgrounds with advanced computing capabilities. Built through a $10 million system acquisition grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Anvil supports scientific discovery by providing resources through the NSF’s Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS), a program that serves tens of thousands of researchers across the United States.

Researchers may request access to Anvil via the ACCESS allocations process. More information about Anvil is available on Purdue’s Anvil website. Anyone with questions should contact anvil@purdue.edu. Anvil is funded under NSF award No. 2005632.

Publications utilizing Anvil

1. Chen C, Feng Z, Gu J. HEALTH, HEALTH INSURANCE, AND INEQUALITY. International Economic Review. Published online July 4, 2024. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/iere.12722
2. Feng, Zhigang and Han, Jiequn and Zhu, Shenghao, Optimal Taxation with Incomplete Markets–An Exploration Via Reinforcement Learning. Available at SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4758552

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu

SC25 is an annual conference where the brightest minds in computing and technology from around the world gather in one location for a week of communication, collaboration, and innovation. The conference took place in St. Louis, Missouri, this year, with 16,500+ attendees and a record-breaking 559 exhibitors. Purdue’s exhibitor booth, hosted by the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC), did not disappoint, engaging with a steady stream of attendees who dropped by to speak with our HPC experts, listen to presentations, and participate in demonstrations.

The central theme for the Purdue booth this year was to promote the Purdue Computes initiative. To help achieve this goal, Purdue provided the conference with booth presentations throughout the week from experts within multiple departments. Purdue staff also participated in numerous workshops, Birds-of-a-feather sessions (BOFs), and panel discussions outside of the booth exhibits, all highlighting the university’s contributions to research computing and HPC in higher education. A full list of SC25 papers and presentations given by Purdue affiliates is as follows:

• Haniye Kashgarani, LJ Lumas, Emma Zheng, and Brendan Swanson: AnvilOps: Increasing Accessibility of Kubernetes with Automated Builds and Deployments
• Paul Jiang: A Formal Characterization of Non-Monotonicity in Tensor Cores
• Richie Tan and Guangzhen Jin: A Modular, Responsive, and Accessible HPC Dashboard Built upon Open OnDemand
• Mithuna Thottethodi, Sree Charan Gundabolu, and Vijaykumar T. N.: BLAZE: Exploiting Hybrid Parallelism and Size-Customized Kernels to Accelerate BLASTP on GPUs
• Elham Sarbijan, FNU Ashish, Christina Joslin, and David Burns: Generating Frequently Asked Questions from Technical Support Tickets using Large Language Models
• David F. Gleich: KVMSR+UDWeave: Extreme-Scaling with Fine-grained Parallelism on the UpDown Graph Supercomputer
• Petros Drineas and Vasileios Georgiou: Randomized Numerical Linear Algebra in HPC: Toward a Sustainable, Scalable Software Ecosystem

Aside from hosting a booth and giving presentations, Purdue assisted directly with making SC25 a success. Purdue staff and affiliates volunteered for the SC25 Planning Committee (the organizing body for SC25), SCinet (the collaborative group that builds the infrastructure and network for the conference), and the Student Cluster Competition (a 48-hour HPC competition). Thanks to these volunteers, Purdue lent its expertise towards building and running the entire conference. Support for SC25 wasn’t limited to employees, however. Purdue also offered hardware for a training session to help ensure the best conference possible.

Anvil, one of Purdue’s most powerful supercomputers, was the main resource used to host an all-day, student-focused workshop at SC25. The workshop consisted of lectures combined with self-paced hands-on activities on HPC, AI, and quantum computing. Each student created their own ACCESS account in order to utilize Anvil, and as a bonus for participating, they will have continual access to the supercomputer for a full year. The exercises mainly focused on accelerated code (CUDA) with both C++ and PyTorch, for which the students used all 84 of Anvil’s cutting-edge H100 GPUs for the entirety of the day. In total, 100 students from multiple institutions took part in the workshop.

SC25 also provided an opportunity for Purdue students to shine. Throughout the week, graduate and undergraduate students from the university were involved in numerous workforce development activities, including giving presentations at the Purdue booth, conducting workshops, and taking part in poster sessions. Two Purdue students competed as part of the INpack team in the 2025 IndySCC, a world-renowned supercomputing competition, while four of the eight Anvil REU students were able to present on the work they conducted during the summer program. Outside of gaining presentation experience, the students were also able to attend different informational sessions and learn about the latest advances in HPC, as well as network and develop connections with people within the community. Providing students with opportunities such as these ties in directly with Purdue’s goal of developing the HPC workforce of the future.

To cap off the fantastic week for Purdue, the new HPL-MXP mixed-precision benchmark list and IO500 lists were released at SC25. Purdue University’s newest supercomputing community cluster, Gautschi, was ranked 27th on the HPL-MXP list and 20th on the IO500 list in the 10 Node Production category. This is an amazing achievement and a testament to the value of Purdue’s continued investment in HPC.

Overall, SC25 was a tremendous success for the university. If you or someone in your department would like to be involved with SC26, please contact  rcac-help@purdue.edu.

For more information regarding HPC and how it can help you, please visit our “Why HPC?” page.

Anvil is one of Purdue University’s most powerful supercomputers, providing researchers from diverse backgrounds with advanced computing capabilities. Built through a $10 million system acquisition grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Anvil supports scientific discovery by providing resources through the NSF’s Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS), a program that serves tens of thousands of researchers across the United States.

Researchers may request access to Anvil via the ACCESS allocations process. More information about Anvil is available on Purdue’s Anvil website. Anyone with questions should contact anvil@purdue.edu. Anvil is funded under NSF award No. 2005632.

RCAC operates all centrally-maintained research computing resources at Purdue University, providing access to leading-edge computational and data storage systems as well as expertise and support to Purdue faculty, staff, and student researchers. To learn more about HPC and how RCAC can help you, please visit: https://www.rcac.purdue.edu/

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu

Year: Freshman

Major: Aerospace Engineering

Position: Envision Center Programmer

Can you introduce yourself and share a little about who you are? Hello! My name is Vlad and I’m an Envision Center programmer!

What are some of your main interests or passions? Some of my interests include aviation, motorsport, fencing, and video game development.

Can you tell us about your role at RCAC? What does your job entail? I’m an Envision Center programmer, and I develop applications that support the visualization and simulation solutions the Envision Center supplies to its clients.

What do you enjoy most about working at RCAC? I enjoy the innovative solutions that the Envision Center allows its programmers to develop through the use of cutting-edge visualization and simulation technology, such as AR and VR. I also enjoy the relaxed working environment and community that helps you learn and feel comfortable at work.

Tell us more about your favorite project you like to show off!

Project title: Containment Zone

Project description: Containment Zone is my debut game release on Steam. Containment Zone is a hardcore, realistic, tactical shooter in which the player fights his way through escaped mutant experiments, zombies, and military private contractors to uncover the secrets of the Object 1611 laboratory, hidden deep within the Soldanesti district Containment Zone. Containment Zone has been in the works for about 2 years now as I have been learning Unity Game Engine and C#.

What did you learn from this project? Professional level Unity programming skills, animation and rendering skills, and I learned how to manage a complex project and lead a development team.

Did you get to showcase this anywhere? Yes, the game has been played by over 3000 players in total and is playable on Steam, the world’s largest PC game platform.