The University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) in Minneapolis, Minnesota is an interdisciplinary research program providing supercomputing resources and user support to faculty and researchers. MSI is located on the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus in Walter Library. MSI provides hardware, software, and technical support resources to researchers at the University of Minnesota and other higher educational institutions in Minnesota.
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In 1981, the University of Minnesota was the first U.S. University to acquire a supercomputer (a Cray-1). The Supercomputing Institute was created in 1984 to provide high-performance computing resources to the University of Minnesota's research community.
In August 2010, Jorge Viñals, former director of CLUMEQ, a Canadian Supercomputing Center led by McGill University in Montreal and Quebec City, became the new director of MSI. He is also a professor of physics at the University of Minnesota.
Since the August 2010 addition of Jorge Vinals as director of MSI, there have been two rounds of reorganization to the institution. Out of three department directors, the two longest-serving members have chosen to leave MSI.
The mission of the institute is supercomputing research, broadly defined as involving the use of high-performance computing environments to address problems in the physical, biological, medical, mathematical, and computing sciences and engineering and other fields. The goal is to promote solutions to problems that could not otherwise be resolved.
MSI offers a summer internship program for undergraduates. Interns work with faculty members and their research groups on projects addressing problems in science and engineering. This includes high-performance computing and scientific modeling and simulation, graphics, visualization, informatics, and high-performance network communications.