Purdue University receives $10M for Anvil supercomputer

Purdue University will soon house Anvil, a powerful supercomputer, thanks to a $10 million reward from the National Science Foundation, according to a press release on Friday. Anvil will be able to support a slew of computing capabilities and data-intensive research, from regular high-performance computations to advanced artificial intelligence (AI) applications. This supercomputer will boost the capacity available to the National Science Foundation's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which serves tens of thousands of researchers across the US and has been a partner to Purdue for nine years. Anvil will begin production in 2021, serving researchers for five years, enabling a wide range of research in areas such as fluid dynamics and bioinformatics, and also for data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning applications. "The name'Anvil' reflects the Purdue Boilermakers' strength and workmanlike focus on producing results and the Anvil supercomputer will enable important discoveries across many different areas of science and engineering," said Preston Smith, executive director of research computing and a co-PI on the project, in the release.