Better Than Removing Your Appendix with a Spork: Developing Faculty Research Partnerships at Purdue University

Purdue's computational infrastructure for research includes six TOP500 supercomputers in as many years, built and managed centrally—with no increase in the central IT budget. The secret: novel business models fashioned around a partnership between central IT and faculty researchers to make more computing power available at a better price and share it in a cooperative that maximizes the investment. Despite initial skepticism, no faculty member who's joined has left Purdue's Community Cluster Program, and the clusters now play a major role in research awards to Purdue researchers in a large and diverse array of fields.