Montana State University, the state’s largest research entity and a designated Carnegie R1 institution, has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to significantly expand its computational infrastructure for research. 

The grant was awarded to MSU’s Research Cyberinfrastructure Core Facility, which manages the advanced information technology systems that support large research objectives like quantum science, large data analysis, machine learning and artificial intelligence. After the new equipment is installed and operational, MSU will have the most powerful high-performance computing capability in the state, according to Coltran Hophan-Nichols, the RCI facility’s director. 

The upgrade will roughly double current computation capacity and increase computing performance for some workloads tenfold, he said.