A grid computing environment for undergraduate research

This paper presents the establishment of cluster computing lab at a minority serving institution that aims to provide computing resources to support undergraduate student research. We will firstly a project for building, configuring, and maintaining the cluster in the lab. The computing resources of the cluster are managed by a job distribution environment that allows the users to upload, compile, and run their jobs. The job distribution software distributes the submitted jobs to the computing nodes of the cluster. Load balancing issues are addressed. Next, we present student research activities performed on the cluster. We will present two related projects that aim to implement the Chemical Reaction Models (CRM) on the cluster using TSpace, and implement CRM on a GPU machine. Participating students were actively involved in presentation and publication of research results.