Lessons Learned When Building a Greenfield High Performance Computing Ecosystem

Faced with a fragmented research computing environment and growing needs for high performance computing resources, Michigan State University established the High Performance Computing Center in 2005 to serve as a central high performance computing resource for MSU’s research community. Like greenfield industrial development, the center was unconstrained by existing infrastructure. The lessons learned are useful when building or maintaining an effective HPC resource and may provide insight for developing other computational services.