Grant Scott edited this article based on:

Astronomers & Engineers Use a Grid of Computers at a National Scale to Study the Universe 300 Times Faster, https://public.nrao.edu/news/astronomers-study-the-universe-300-times-faster/

Compute nodes that were sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Campus Cyberinfrastructure program at campuses within the Great Plains Region have continually contributed to national research initiatives through NSF’s Partnership to Advance Throughput Computing (PATh).

“The NRAO manages some of the largest and most used radio telescopes in the world, including the NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). When these telescopes are observing the Universe, they collect vast amounts of data, for hours, months, even years at a time, depending on what they are studying.” – Article

Where does GPN fit in?

“Rather than sending one Mt. Petabytes to one supercomputing facility, the data was divided into pieces and distributed to smaller banks of computers with GPUs, distributed to university computing centers across the country both large and small.”  In the GPN, these are servers on the campuses of University of Missouri, University of Nebraska, and Kansas State University (see map below).

The GP-ENGINE project is currently supporting 30-40 research projects each month, providing over 10,000 GPU hours per month for data processing workloads such as the NRAO.