The Genesis of the WAVE Project

A $639,000 grant from the E. L. Wiegand Foundation in 2018 enabled Santa Clara University to launch its first high-performance computing cluster and the Wiegand Advanced Visualization Environment (WAVE). The grant came as computation technologies matured quickly, faculty across a wide range of disciplines adopted computationally intensive methods, and student interest in STEM increased computing enrollments by as much as 400% in a single decade.

Responding to that campus-wide demand, the University built a hub for interdisciplinary projects that combined computational power with immersive 3-D visualization. The grant let SCU move beyond a patchwork of small, department-specific systems and build its first centralized, high-performance computational resource.

Building the Initial HPC Cluster

The Wiegand Foundation's investment funded the core hardware for the first phase of the WAVE HPC Center. Following an implementation plan carried out in 2019, the University installed a "massively parallel" compute cluster of 10 high-performance compute and GPU nodes. The system was built to handle processing-intensive jobs, including Monte Carlo simulations, climate modeling, and artificial intelligence algorithms, cutting processing times from weeks to hours. Beyond supporting faculty research, the added GPU capacity also let a new set of undergraduate and graduate courses expose students to computational problems and industry-standard HPC environments.

The grant also funded a virtualized system to run HPC software, including head nodes and login nodes for user authentication, along with a storage system with several hundred terabytes of space and a 10G interconnect for high-speed data transfer across the network.

The Visualization Lab and Workstations

Beyond the back-end servers, the E. L. Wiegand Foundation funded a dedicated visualization lab to help researchers evaluate and communicate complex data. The grant funded 12 GPU-enabled Dell Precision workstations, each paired with 32" ultra-high-resolution 4K monitors, to support data analysis, illustration, and AR/VR development. For immersive research, the Foundation also provided HTC Pro Eye virtual reality headsets with integrated eye-tracking, used in studies involving human visual engagement. The lab includes an 82" 4K TV monitor so classes and research teams can view large-scale data visualizations together.

Implementation and Legacy

The first phase of the WAVE hardware was installed and optimized throughout 2019, becoming fully operational for the start of the Winter 2020 academic term. Originally housed in a temporary 400-square-foot facility in Varsi Hall, this equipment served as the prototype for the interdisciplinary STEM research model the University later adopted more broadly. Today, the hardware funded by the E. L. Wiegand Foundation is still part of the Center's computational infrastructure, supporting faculty research and student co-authored publications as SCU continues to expand its HPC resources.