The E. L. Wiegand Foundation: Establishing the Infrastructure

The E. L. Wiegand Foundation provided the foundational support that allowed Santa Clara University to launch the WAVE project. A $639,000 grant awarded in 2018 funded the acquisition of the Center's initial "massively parallel" compute cluster and specialized visualization equipment.

This investment addressed a need for centralized, high-performance hardware, moving the University away from a patchwork of departmental labs and toward a unified, campus-wide resource. The grant covered the initial hardware, including high-end GPU nodes, data storage, and the networking equipment connecting them, which still supports the Center's research today.

The Fletcher Jones Foundation: Empowering the Community

While the hardware provided the capacity, the Fletcher Jones Foundation supported broader adoption across the University. In 2023, the Foundation awarded a $1 million grant titled "Catalyzing Undergraduate Experiences in Advanced Computation and Visualization."

This grant was designed to expand HPC's impact by funding people, not just hardware. It supports a five-year initiative that funds faculty course-redesign stipends, skills-based workshops, and catalytic research grants, and it established a $250,000 fellowship endowment so a mentorship model, where advanced students support and guide their peers, continues at the Center.

The E. L. Wiegand Foundation

Learn about the initial 2018 grant and the launch of the WAVE cluster.

[The Fletcher Jones Foundation]

Discover the ongoing programmatic work and student fellowship opportunities enabled by this $1M investment.