UB tops in New York for computer infrastructure awards

BUFFALO, N.Y. – The University at Buffalo is top among all New York universities and colleges in receiving support from the National Science Foundation Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC).

The OAC is the federal government’s primary vehicle for establishing state-of-the-art computing infrastructure at U.S. colleges and universities.

The resources and services available at these research environments are essential to the advancement and transformation of science and engineering, including emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and data science.

OAC-funded work and facilities also promote dynamic ecosystems where uniquely skilled researchers collaborate to develop solutions for society’s most pressing challenges.

UB has 12 active OAC awards totaling more than $17.8 million, including a $10 million grant to develop software that academia, industry and government agencies use to manage high-performance computing infrastructure.

“As support from the National Science Foundation Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure shows, UB has the resources and skilled workforce to lead critically important federal research initiatives,” says Venu Govindaraju, UB vice president for research and economic development. “We are a leader not only in New York State, but nationwide, in developing innovative solutions to complex, technically challenging problems facing society.”

The $10 million award, awarded last April, involves contributions from six additional institutions, including Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. It supports work at UB’s supercomputing facility, the Center for Computational Research, to develop software that monitors and measures NSF-funded ACCESS Cyberinfrastructure facilities. Additionally, hundreds of supercomputing facilities worldwide use the software to ensure their computing infrastructure runs as efficiently as possible.

“Our work in this domain positions UB as a nationwide leader in computational and data-intensive science and engineering research, as well as a key developer of trustworthy and reusable tools for the management and use of computing and digital information,” says the grant’s principal investigator Thomas Furlani, chief information officer at Roswell Park and a research associate professor of biomedical informatics in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB.

The work also promotes U.S. leadership in science and engineering, increases the nation’s economic competitiveness and strengthens national security.

The University at Buffalo has been a worldwide leader in artificial intelligence research and education for nearly 50 years. This includes pioneering work creating the world’s first autonomous handwriting recognition system, which the U.S. Postal Service and Royal Mail adopted to save billions of dollars. As New York’s flagship university, that legacy of innovation continues today. UB researchers are committed to using AI for social good, including developing new technology that addresses the shortage of speech-language pathologists in K-12 education, deepfakes, the need for improved medical imaging and more.