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| Center for Computation and Visualization (Brown University) | |
|---|---|
| Name | Center for Computation and Visualization |
| Formed | 2007 |
| Location | Providence, Rhode Island |
| Type | Research Support Facility |
| Affiliations | Brown University |
Center for Computation and Visualization (Brown University) is an interdisciplinary service and research unit that provides high-performance computing, data visualization, and scholarly cyberinfrastructure support within an academic environment. Established to coordinate computational resources across campus, the center supports investigators in computational science, digital humanities, and data analytics through shared infrastructure, domain expertise, and training programs.
The center was created amid institutional initiatives to expand research computing at Brown University, following national trends exemplified by investments at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and University of California, Berkeley. Early development drew on federal programs administered by the National Science Foundation and models from regional partners such as Harvard University and Dartmouth College. Leadership engaged campus units including the Department of Computer Science, School of Engineering, and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs to align priorities with scholars from fields represented by the School of Public Health, Department of Economics, and Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. Over time, the center has evolved in response to computational advances at facilities like Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and collaborations with commercial providers such as NVIDIA and Intel.
The center operates clusters and visualization laboratories outfitted with hardware comparable to installations at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and visualization suites inspired by designs from Stanford Visualization Group and UC San Diego Supercomputer Center. Core compute resources include CPU-based nodes similar to architectures deployed at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and GPU-accelerated systems leveraging accelerators from NVIDIA and interconnects like those used at Texas Advanced Computing Center. Storage and data management draw on strategies implemented at National Center for Supercomputing Applications and European Organization for Nuclear Research. Visualization facilities support immersive display configurations paralleling installations at University of Illinois at Chicago and software ecosystems used by groups at Princeton University and Columbia University. The center’s machine room adheres to standards promoted by Uptime Institute and cooling practices informed by case studies from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Services include high-performance computing allocations for projects in collaboration with investigators affiliated with Department of Biology, Department of Physics, Department of Applied Mathematics, and interdisciplinary initiatives like Brown Institute for Translational Science. The center supports workflows and reproducibility practices championed by organizations such as Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry, and contributes compute cycles to domain science efforts akin to those at NOAA and NASA. Research enabled by center resources spans computational fluid dynamics, molecular dynamics, machine learning, and digital scholarship, with user communities comparable to those at Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Staff provide consulting on performance optimization, parallel programming models originating from work at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, and data visualization approaches used by projects at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Library of Congress.
The center offers workshops and courses aligned with pedagogy from Carnegie Mellon University and training frameworks promoted by EDUCAUSE and The Carpentries. Programs address skills for students and researchers associated with Brown University departments such as Department of Computer Science, Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, and professional schools including Brown University School of Public Health. Instruction covers parallel computing paradigms influenced by curricula at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, containerization workflows popularized by Docker, Inc. and orchestration patterns seen in Kubernetes deployments at research institutions. The center hosts internship and fellowship opportunities modeled after initiatives at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and collaborative seminars with centers like Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
The center maintains partnerships with federal agencies including National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, regional consortia similar to New England Board of Higher Education, and technology vendors such as Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Collaborative research involves faculty from the School of Engineering, School of Public Health, and humanities units engaged with projects related to collections at RISD Museum and digitization efforts comparable to Digital Public Library of America. Inter-institutional agreements mirror cooperative frameworks employed by XSEDE and research exchange mechanisms used at University of Michigan and Yale University.
Governance is administered through university-appointed leadership coordinating with deans from the School of Engineering and the Faculty Executive Committee; budgetary models reflect grant-supported cores seen at University Research Centers and operating structures influenced by practices at Association of American Universities. Funding sources include institutional allocations from Brown University and extramural grants from National Science Foundation, research contracts with agencies like Department of Defense, and equipment donations or partnerships with corporations such as IBM and Microsoft. Advisory input has been solicited from stakeholders representing academic departments, research centers, and affiliates of national research infrastructures exemplified by National Science Foundation programs.