Gopher Supercomputing: Past, Present, and Future

The University of Minnesota has been a longstanding leader in scientific computing. It was the first U.S. University to buy a supercomputer, from Minnesota- and Wisconsin-based Cray Research in 1981. In the years since, the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute has offered on-campus computing resources and technical expertise to thousands of researchers around the state, enabling scientific discoveries in disciplines including genetics, chemistry, astronomy, and economics.

As an engineer at MSI, I've seen firsthand the value of this resource to the research community, and the interesting legacy quirks that come with operating a decades-old computing center.

In this session, I'll share an overview of MSI's history, a virtual tour of its current datacenter in the basement of a 100-year-old library, and get into the tech we use today and some examples of the computational research people are doing. And we'll touch on how things may change in the years ahead, as AI seeps into academia and hyperscalers eat the world's hardware supply.

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