Catalyzing Undergraduate Innovation

In 2023, Santa Clara University received a $1 million grant from the Fletcher Jones Foundation titled "Cultivating Undergraduate Experiences in Advanced Computation and Visualization." The investment moves high-performance computing (HPC) beyond specialized labs and into the undergraduate experience across disciplines. By funding "human capital," the skills, training, and mentorship needed to use advanced hardware, the grant helps prepare students and faculty to work in an increasingly data-driven world.

A Financial Model for Sustainability

The grant is structured to provide both immediate impact and long-term support. Of the $1 million total, $750,000 was allocated for current-use spending over a five-year capacity-building period, funding the daily operations of the initiative, including new curricula, faculty learning communities, and skills-based workshops. The remaining $250,000 created the Fletcher Jones Advanced Computation and Visualization Fellowship Endowment, which will continue to grow and provide annual support for student fellowships and mentorship programs after the initial grant period ends.

Expanding the Computational Curriculum

A primary goal of the Fletcher Jones initiative is to build computational literacy across the university's academic departments. The grant provides stipends of $2,000 to $5,000 for faculty who redesign existing courses or develop new modules that integrate HPC resources. These efforts have already embedded computational skills into disciplines as varied as climate change modeling in Environmental Science, molecular modeling in Biology, and customer analytics in the Leavey School of Business. This support is supplemented by skills-based workshops and boot camps that teach tools like Python, Machine Learning, and Slurm, so students outside traditional computer science majors can also gain these technical skills.

Peer Mentorship through Student Fellows

Central to the project is the HPC Student Fellows Program, a peer mentorship model that builds a self-sustaining support community. Under the guidance of faculty mentors, student fellows serve as technical specialists for the HPC Center: they help peers with technical trouble tickets, write new tutorials, and consult on research projects. The program extends the reach of HPC services across campus while giving the fellows themselves hands-on technical experience relevant to future work in industry or academia.

Measuring Impact and Future Growth

SCU's computational capacity has grown substantially since the grant took effect. The university has nearly tripled its computing capacity, increasing available CPU cores and GPUs through hardware upgrades and corporate equipment gifts valued at over $250,000.

These investments have been supplemented by other donors, including GPU hardware support from Supermicro and NVIDIA, and a new $1 million gift establishing the Stitt Family Distinguished Visiting Professorship in computing, which will bring a visiting expert to campus each year to work with SCU collaborators on computational problems. The university is also preparing to join the national "Science DMZ" consortium, a high-speed network infrastructure built for transferring large scientific datasets, which will support data-intensive research collaborations between SCU faculty and national labs and other research institutions.