As the state’s premier research institution, Mississippi State University brings in hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding each year. But that investment doesn’t just happen. Before the contracts are signed and checks are written, someone, somewhere must have a vision—an idea worthy of the time, money and manpower.
This is the story of one such idea. And it was born over po’boys at Oby’s, a Cajun-themed restaurant in Starkville.
In the late 1980s, MSU President Donald Zacharias was presented an opportunity too good to pass up. Sen. John C. Stennis wanted a proposal—a pitch for a $5 million building—and he needed it in 48 hours.
Don Trotter and Joe Thompson, engineering faculty members who were MSU Kappa Sigma Fraternity brothers, stepped up to the plate.
“Our department heads—Billie Ball in electrical and computer engineering and Charlie Cliett in aerospace—told us they needed a one-page proposal. They were good friends and encouraged collaboration between our departments,” Thompson recalled. “They put me, Don Trotter and David Whitfield on the task, so we went to Oby’s for lunch and talked it over.”
A 1961 physics graduate who was among the first Ph.Ds on the university’s aerospace engineering faculty, Thompson was a field-leading expert in the development of computational fluid dynamics, commonly known as CFD. Trotter, a 1960 electrical engineering alum who returned to his undergraduate department after an early career in Silicon Valley, was pioneering microelectronics. David Whitfield, who Thompson helped recruit to MSU, joined the team, bringing additional CFD expertise.
Trotter said that interdisciplinary approach—getting leading faculty from different academic departments to work toward the same goal—would turn out to be the key to success. He credits Ball, Cliett and Robert “Bob” Altenkirch, the engineering dean at the time who later became vice president for research, for encouraging the collaboration.
“We were interested in the synergy of our research,” Trotter said. “We wanted to find a way to combine our work to get the most out of both areas—taking their CFD and my microelectronics to perform more powerful computations and reliable simulations.”
Thompson added, “By the middle of that afternoon at Oby’s, we had a proposal to send Dr. Zacharias for a building that would combine the two areas.
“That’s the day,” he continued. “That’s the very beginning of advanced scientific computing at MSU, and there’s a plaque over the table at the restaurant to commemorate it.”
The proposal was accepted in August 1987, and the university was awarded $5 million—approximately $14 million today—for a new complex to be built in the then-new MSU research park.
With work underway for the physical space, Thompson said the team turned its attention to finding funding for the research it would house. The National Science Foundation had the answer.
“We had about $50,000 in research grants, but we needed something in the millions,” Thompson said. “That’s when we found the NSF Engineering Research Center program, which at the time was reputed to be one of the most competitive.”
Designed to support university-based interdisciplinary research centers across the U.S., the NSF ERC program was established in 1985. In the four decades since, it has funded 83 centers. When MSU applied in 1989, it was one of 43 in the running that year. Of those, the foundation visited seven universities. Only three received funding.
“That tells you what the odds were,” Thompson said. “The competition was stiff, but I thought we had done a good job, and we had something the other schools didn’t.
“While the other guys were up there saying, ‘We have 10 rooms in a building,’ we could say we will have a whole building—that was one big factor,” he continued. “The other big factor was a commitment from Dr. Zacharias and the provost for 14 new, fully funded faculty positions. They had the vision. They were committed. And when I put those cards on the table, I knew we had a winning hand.”
Thompson got the call that the NSF pitch was successful while attending a meeting at Ole Miss.
“I went to a faculty member’s office to take the call, and I had to get through the rest of the meeting with a straight face because the formal, public announcement wouldn’t be for a couple of days,” he recalled. “Meanwhile, people back in Starkville were dancing in the hallways.”
Their success meant the MSU ERC would receive between $2 million and $5 million annually for the life of the award, which could be up to 11 years—provided the university passed two mid-project “live-or-die” reviews.
Mississippi State engineering faculty Don Trotter, David Whitfield and Joe Thompson look at an early computational fluid dynamics model. The science combined Thompson and Whitfield’s aerospace engineering knowledge with Trotter’s research into microelectronics.
The Beginning
Mississippi State officially launched the MSU NSF Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulation in 1990, with Thompson as director. The researchers were able to move into their Stennis-sponsored building in 1991.
“At the time, we couldn’t have known what it was going to become 30 years later, but we knew it was the start of something,” Trotter said.
Thompson said the university promised the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning board that the MSU ERC could provide a 3-to-1 return on the state’s investment—it doubled that return in the first year alone.
Then, in 1998, the university made a splash on the international stage when NASA turned to the MSU ERC for help. When John Glenn returned to space aboard the space shuttle Discovery for the STS-95 mission, a protective cover dislodged during launch. This could have led to catastrophic failure during reentry. Using its newly developed grid technologies—an advancement of computations fluid dynamics modeling—MSU was able to simulate the events and confirm the veracity of NASA’s solution to the problem. The work was completed in less than two days thanks to MSU’s expertise.
“They did the computation in around 36 hours—something that had taken NASA six months to complete,” Trotter recalled. “That was the objective of the MSU ERC: to make all those operations much more efficient, much quicker. It was a great example of what we were all about.”
With so much success, Mississippi State passed all the mandated mid-project reviews—one under Thompson’s leadership and the next when Trotter had taken the helm. MSU successfully completed all 11 years of its NSF ERC project, receiving approximately $55 million in funding over the life of the project—no small feat in itself.
Even more impressive, the Mississippi State University ERC successfully “graduated” from the program to become a self-sustaining research center.
“That’s the point of NSF’s ERC program. They get you started, then you go on to glory having secured outside funding for your work,” Thompson explained. “Most ERCs don’t make it to graduation, and even fewer find success when the NSF funding is done, but we did. We were one of their first success stories.”
The Next Phase
In 2001, the MSU NSF Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulation officially became the MSU High Performance Computing Collaboratory, known as HPC2, thanks in part to a significant investment from the state legislature meant to attract Nissan, and the leadership of then-university President Malcolm Portera.
“When Nissan was looking to build a new factory in the South, a big part of why they came to Mississippi was the ERC,” Thompson explained. “The legislature made a significant investment in MSU and HPC2 for the creation of another groundbreaking research center, CAVS, which would help support Nissan’s needs.”
The Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems, known as CAVS, became the research park neighbor of the HPC2 building—which was later dedicated in honor of Portera. CAVS was the first in a series of new research centers that would fall under the HPC2 umbrella.
Another major advance came from the U.S. Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program, when HPC2 was selected to lead a multi-university and industry team in support of DOD supercomputer centers across the country.
“Dr. Portera was on the road when I called to tell him we had won that $108 million competition,” Thompson continued. “An hour later, he was in my office with a bottle of champagne. I cannot give enough credit to those two presidents—Dr. Zacharias and Dr. Portera—and Dr. Ralph Powe, who was vice president of research when this all started. They saw opportunity and gave us the resources and support to make it happen.”
And the rest, as they say, is history. Specifically, a 35-year history that has led to $1.2 billion in research and development expenditures, and an incalculable impact on the education of generations of Bulldog students.
The Future
This year, the university announced the next evolution of high-performance computing at MSU with the creation of the Applied Research Collaboratory. This new umbrella organization will allow the centers to continue their focus on real-world problems while further facilitating interdisciplinary work.
MSU Chief Information Officer Trey Breckenridge, who previously served as director of HPC2 and is still an active researcher with the unit, said the original work of the MSU ERC really laid the foundation not only for high-performance computing but also for establishing the university as an international leader in the science.
“Back in the early ’90s, we weren’t just consumers of high-performance computing, we were developing it—both the hardware and the software that would make it what it is today,” Breckenridge said. “It was visionary leadership that brought that to fruition years ago, and it’s continued visionary leadership that’s maintained that status and is taking us into the future.”
Breckenridge credits MSU President Mark E. Keenum and his executive leadership team with the foresight to keep Mississippi State at the forefront of high-performance computing while also investing resources in emerging sciences that are going to reshape the world of tomorrow, the same way high-performance computing reshaped the world decades ago.
Artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, machine learning and autonomy are the computing sciences that will power the future, and Mississippi State is leading and will continue to lead in their development.
“Mississippi State is leveraging our historic experience and our expertise in these and emerging areas of computing science to keep us on the forefront,” he said. “Artificial intelligence—it is high-performance computing. You can’t have it without the machines that power it. We have the infrastructure and the vision to take things to the next level.
“We’re among a very elite number of U.S. universities that have been doing high-performance computing for as long as we have,” he continued. “And with leadership who continue to put a focus on that, while investing in the technology of tomorrow, we’re going to continue to lead the country in advanced, broad scientific research for decades to come.
By Susan Lassetter, Photos by Grace Cockrell & MSU Archives
Dawn Reynolds, interim director of HPC2, and Clay Walden, executive director of CAVS, share a meal at the table where their respective world-renowned research centers first took shape.