With an $11 million gift, HPE has created a new research center for the Texas A&M University System: the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Center for Computer Architecture Research. In the age of big data, the center has launched with a timely mission: “to lead the way into this new world of data-driven computing architectures through academic-industry collaboration.”
HPE’s donation has two major components: research equipment valued at $10.5 million and a $1 million endowment (matched by Texas A&M for $500,000) for a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Chair professor. The first person to fill that role will be R. Stanley Williams – a former HPE Senior Fellow – who will also lead the center.
The new equipment includes a Clustex (which deposits material layers on a wafer), a Titan Cubed Themis TEM Microscope, a NanoLab 461F1 electron microscope, and more. The donation is intended to give the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) an edge in a number of areas, beginning with advanced materials fabrication, future electronic devices, advanced photonics and new computer architectures.
“This is an extremely significant gift of equipment and the hiring of Stan Williams places us at the forefront of next generation discovery in computation, non-linear dynamical electronics and materials,” said Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp. “There is no other cleanroom in the state of Texas that has all five of the high-end instruments HPE is donating, and we plan to become a regional hub for next-generation nano- and micro-engineering. We owe tremendous appreciation to HPE CTO Mark Potter, whose vision for leveraging our joint assets will build a world class laboratory and attract preeminent talent in the broad area of materials.”
Furthermore, TEES has contributed $2 million for renovations to the Giesecke Engineering Research Building and will be hiring three faculty to support the new equipment and research focuses.
“It typically takes three to four years of intensive effort and institutional support to acquire even one instrument that HPE just donated,” said Dr. Arum Han, director of the AggieFab Nanofabrication Facility at Texas A&M. “Having five such high-end instruments coming to our cleanroom facility simultaneously is just absolutely amazing and is unheard of for any university cleanroom.”