Clemson leapfrogs into the ranks of information technology leadership

President James F. Barker, FAIA

Dear Friend of Clemson,

University presidents never have a shortage of great ideas that need funding. It’s one of the byproducts of being constantly surrounded by highly educated, creative people who are persuasive communicators and passionate about what they do. Since there’s never enough money — especially in these economic times — part of the president’s job is to decide which of those ideas offers the greatest value for students and faculty and will yield the highest return on investment for the university.

At Clemson, we start by passing ideas through a series of filters. Most don’t survive, at least not in their original shape. Some of those filters are:

Does the idea support one of the 10-year goals we adopted in 2001?
Is it a priority in our five-year strategic plan (the “Clemson Road Map”)?
Does it support the academic core of the University, that essential interaction between a faculty member and a student in the classroom?
Will it generate additional revenues?
Does it give us a competitive edge? That is, will this investment put us at the forefront, or still leave us with catching up to do?

Two years ago, an idea passed all the filters — a smart (rather than huge) investment in cyberinfrastructure, with a strategy that was more about building partnerships and leveraging existing resources than competing to have the most teraflops.

The result is that Clemson has moved to No. 6 among academic institutions in the country and No. 60 worldwide on the most recent list of TOP500 Supercomputing Sites, a list published twice a year by the International Supercomputing Conference. The University has ranked as high as No. 1 in computer cycle contributions to IBM's World Community Grid for humanitarian research, faculty are more competitive for research proposals, and we are sought-after consultants to other agencies interested in outsourcing their IT needs to us.

This Web site tells the story of Clemson’s leapfrog into the ranks of information technology leadership. But it’s not a story about fibers and switches. It’s about the pathways that technology is creating between teaching and learning, problems and solutions, ideas and innovation — and the people who travel those pathways in cyber-Clemson.

Sincerely,
James F. Barker, FAIA, President

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