Modern society generates huge amounts of data - numbers, words, measurements and observations that describe what’s happening in our lives and in the world. Translating that data into useful information is the work of data science, one of the world’s fastest-growing professions.
Data science draws on expertise from multiple disciplines, including science, engineering, education, social sciences and business. Data scientists extract data and use technology to analyze and process to draw useful insights to meet needs and solve problems in areas such as health care, business, education and the environment. Techniques used to make sense of this data include machine learning, artificial intelligence and computer graphics for data visualization.
WARLOC
The Wilkes WARLOC Supercomputer is the only one of its kind in the region.
The Wilkes Accelerated Research Learning and Outreach Cluster — WARLOC, for short — is the region’s largest supercomputer. It allows faculty and students to perform high-caliber research on the most demanding computational problems, including:
- climate change and landslide prediction
- genomic analysis
- artificial intelligence
- drug design
- nanotechnology
- medical device design
- protein folding
- quantum computing
The National Science Foundation granted Wilkes $486,000 to purchase the instrument. Wilkes is the only institution of higher learning in the region with such advanced computational facilities.
College of Science and Engineering students are given hands-on training in use and administration of the WARLOC supercomputer. This gives them a unique skill set difficult to acquire in most undergraduate settings.
WARLOC contains a wide variety of specialized components that allow it to solve a variety of problems. These include:
- state-of-the art GPUs that can be used for computational physics or artificial intelligence;
- large memory nodes that can load more than a terabyte of data into memory at a time;
- over 300 terabytes of storage for incredibly large datasets.
WARLOC also contains virtual workstation nodes that allow up to 30 simultaneous interactive desktops. This means that WARLOC can mimic an entire engineering computer lab all by itself, allowing students to have remote access to state-of-the-art workstations.
Students of any discipline can come into this particular research center and utilize the [Wilkes Accelerated Research Learning and Outreach Cluster) however they need.
Joseph Gubbiotti '20 - Wilkes University System Administrator
NSF Grant Funds High-Performance Computer Cluster
Wilkes University received a Major Research Instrumentation award from the National Science Foundation. Totaling over $486,000, the award will help Wilkes acquire a high-performance computer cluster, a state-of-the-art tool that supports student-faculty research across a variety of science, engineering and mathematics disciplines.
Collaboration Group Faculty
Wilkes University’s Data Science Collaboration Group comprises faculty from across disciplines to pursue collaborative research projects:
Assistant Professor of Math and Computer Science
Professor of Business Law
Associate Professor of Math and Computer Science
Assistant Professor of Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences
Associate Professor of Physics and Bioengineering