The CUNY Grid is a multi-campus CUNY project that began in 2001 with the development of several parallel-LINUX clusters at The Graduate Center. The grid provides high-end computational support to science and social science doctoral programs, particularly those that were campus based.  The grid was recently upgraded to include several 64-bit computers.

The CUNY Grid now includes parallel LINUX clusters from two other CUNY campuses: The City College of New York and The College of Staten Island.  The clusters are linked through a dedicated virtual private network to form a computational grid that can be used by CUNY faculty and doctoral students across the CUNY system. 

The CUNY Grid Project serves the research and instructional needs of the diverse group of active CUNY researchers, aggregating high-performance parallel computing facilities developed at The Graduate Center and at other CUNY colleges. The range of disciplines represented by the users of the research grid includes computational chemistry, computational biology, computer science, mathematics, physics and the social sciences.
The project is centered at The Graduate Center, where CUNY doctoral courses and research seminars meet, and is accessible to all the campuses in the CUNY system. The Graduate Center’s Office of Vice President for Information Technology and External Programs administers the project; the Project Director is Dr. Florian Lengyel, Assistant Director for Research Computing.
The CUNY Graduate Center currently supports three doctoral student Technology Fellowship recipients, who assist with the operation, management and design of the grid and with specialized applications. The Technology Fellows also serve as technical liaisons between The Graduate Center and faculty and student grid users at the various campus sites. Research groups and departments may recommend their doctoral students for these fellowships as they become available.

The CUNY Grid project also provides training and assistance to CUNY faculty and student researchers who wish to use the grid and participate in its development.

CUNY Grid Users

There are currently 44 CUNY faculty researchers in eight disciplines (biochemistry, biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, finance, fire dynamics, mathematics and physics) from seven CUNY campuses and 48 doctoral student users from eight CUNY campuses. A sample of their research activities includes computational chemistry, photonics, quantal density functional theory, genetic algorithms for phylogenetic analysis, traffic simulation, computational number theory, protein folding and molecular recognition, and combinatorial models of evolutionary processes.