Impact

Since its founding through the generosity of the E. L. Wiegand Foundation, the Fletcher Jones Foundation, and the Wright Foundation, WAVE has grown into a campus-wide engine for computational research, teaching, and creative exploration at Santa Clara University. Through Catalytic Faculty Project Grants, the center seeds faculty research on the HPC cluster in fields ranging from AI and machine learning to molecular dynamics and graph theory. Course development awards have brought high-performance computing directly into the classroom, giving students in parallel computing, machine learning, and data science courses hands-on experience with the tools used in industry and graduate research. Skills-based workshops and short courses extend that access to the entire campus, teaching Linux, SLURM job scheduling, and Python-based data analysis to students of any major. The Emerging Research Student Cohort pairs student fellows with faculty mentors, technical support, and stipends to pursue their own computational research.

Alongside the HPC, the Imaginarium lab brings WAVE's mission to the intersection of technology, arts, and humanities. A dedicated space for extended reality (VR, AR, MR), data visualization, digital art, and game design, the Imaginarium hosts student research and production teams, faculty projects, guest speakers, and events like the XR Race, with student work presented at venues including ICA and Meaningful XR. Together, the HPC Center and the Imaginarium form a complete pipeline from raw computation to immersive visualization, uniting researchers, students, and creators across every school at SCU.