On the fifth floor of the Life Science Laboratories overlooking the UMass Amherst campus sits Professor Jianhan Chen’s lab. Here, you’ll find him studying the functional building blocks of life: proteins. More specifically, he studies intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), a flexible and dynamic class of proteins Chen jokingly refers to as “floppy noodles.”

Ask him about his research and he will explain, with enthusiasm and generous detail, what this work is revealing, why it matters so deeply to human health, and what it requires: massive computing power.

Knock on the doors of many other labs at UMass Amherst, and you'll hear similar stories. Some of the university’s most important discoveries are made possible through UMass Amherst’s research computing resources, located at the intercollegiate research computing data center known as the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) in Holyoke, MA. At UMass Amherst, the MGHPCC provides a shared, reliable environment to deploy the Unity cluster, a large-scale research computing platform for the growing demands of modern science.

That infrastructure will only matter more in the coming years. As scientific questions grow more complex and data-intensive — and researchers think about how newer tools like AI and machine learning may fit into their work — universities need the capacity to store massive datasets, run sophisticated simulations, and support researchers working across disciplines. UMass Amherst's strong computing foundation helps researchers pursue work that would be difficult or impossible to support lab by lab.

Getting to this point took time, investment, and iteration.

How It All Started: One Little Cluster

UMass Amherst's research computing efforts date back to the late 1960s, but in 2013, computing at MGHPCC began a new chapter in access for UMass researchers. UMass Amherst's first computing clusters at MGHPCC went live in 2014, but the community quickly outgrew them. Demand outpaced capacity. In response, the Faculty Senate Research Council unanimously approved a resolution that asked IT to explore ways to address these concerns and better meet the needs of researchers on the Amherst campus.

Then came Unity. In 2018, UMass Amherst IT created Unity, a new computing cluster to provide widespread access to critical research computing resources. Over time and with the help of multiple partners and funding sources, Unity expanded to what it is now: a shared cluster supporting over 500 research groups with 1,400+ GPUs, 30,000+ CPU cores, the equivalent of over 3,000 desktop computers, and five petabytes of storage.

“Unity was created around three principles that still shape it today: federated, multi-institutional access from day one; the ability for researchers to acquire dedicated resources to support their labs; and broader shared access when computing capacity is not in use, through the cluster idle cycle,” said Chris Misra, vice chancellor for information technology and CIO at UMass Amherst.

Researchers remember the time before UMass Amherst’s computing infrastructure at MGHPCC as a logistical struggle.

“I was hired in 2011, so this infrastructure did not exist. To do what I wanted to do, I had to purchase my own server,” says Li-Jun Ma, 2026 Mahoney Life Science Prize recipient and comparative genomics researcher.

One night, Ma recalls, the air conditioning broke down in her temporary server room, and she had to come to campus to open doors and windows to prevent the server from overheating. So when Unity came around, she was one of the earliest researchers to move her work to the shared cluster.

“I was delighted,” she says. 

Ashwin Ramasubramaniam, a materials researcher, didn’t have his own server to handle the depth of work he needed, so he had to rely on national resources. Intensive simulations could take months, sometimes years, of runtime using hundreds of CPUs.

“You really had to still rely on national-scale supercomputing for doing many things that we can do routinely over here today,” he says. “Now we are able to get meaningful research work done, which requires a lot more resources. UMass has been great in bridging that gap.” 

Jianhan Chen: Studying the molecular mysteries of life

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For Chen, access to Unity's computing power has been a “game changer.” Research computing plays a role in nearly everything his lab does.

Because the proteins Chen studies are so dynamic and difficult to capture through traditional methods alone, simulation is essential to understanding how they behave at the molecular level. His work also includes ion channels, which are essential to bodily functions like thinking and heartbeat.

With UMass Amherst’s GPU-enabled infrastructure, Chen can run simulations at a scale and speed that allow his lab to ask more “what if” questions, run more experiments, and explore lines of inquiry that would otherwise be far more difficult to pursue.

“There are so many things that we could not even do without having access to this type of computational resource,” he says. 

Ashwin Ramasubramaniam: Unlocking the future of materials

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Ramasubramaniam studies nanoscale materials — materials with structures so small they are measured in billionths of a meter and can have unique physical or chemical properties.

His work focuses on how materials behave at the atomic scale, including how electrons, heat, and radiation move through matter. For research like this, which involves both explaining what experimentalists are seeing and exploring which ideas are worth testing, predictive modeling is a necessity.

“Often we’ll have a new idea, then test it out on a computer first before we invest in buying fancy chemicals, training people, and sending our experimental staff on a quest,” he says. “Research computing at UMass is orders of magnitude better than it was a decade ago.”

He also points out that the shared infrastructure gives researchers a chance to use state-of-the-art systems and test new approaches even if they do not have the resources to build that capacity on their own.

“It democratizes access,” he says. “It opens up a lot more opportunities for people that would not ordinarily have those deep pockets and those deep wells of funding.”

Li-Jun Ma: Tracing the evolution of global crop disease

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For Li-Jun Ma, research computing is the hidden engine behind modern genomics work.

Ma studies fungal pathogens and how they evolve, adapt, and infect different hosts. That work produces enormous volumes of sequencing data, “millions or billions” of data points that must be stored, processed, and analyzed before they can become a meaningful scientific hypothesis.

“It’s our bread and butter,” Ma says. “Without that process, a strong testable scientific hypothesis is hard to generate.”

One major example is her lab’s work on a fungal pathogen affecting bananas globally. Her team, including collaborators in China, South Africa, and the United States, is trying to understand how the pathogen evolved such a strong ability to infect hosts and spread across banana-growing regions. It’s a question with major consequences for agriculture and food systems around the world.

Their research has shown that the newer banana-threatening pathogen, known as Tropical Race 4, has a distinct evolutionary origin from earlier strains and uses a different molecular mechanism. That kind of insight could help scientists pursue more targeted approaches to disease control rather than broad interventions that affect soil fungal ecosystems.

Ma often thinks about small farmers and families who invest everything they have into a crop, only to see disease wipe out a season’s harvest, and with it, their financial stability.

“It’s really heartbreaking to see a situation like that,” she says.

Using UMass Amherst’s research infrastructure, she can work towards a solution.

A critical resource for the future

At UMass Amherst, research computing has become an indispensable part of how discovery happens. It gives researchers the ability to ask larger questions, work through more complexity, and move ideas forward with a level of speed and scale that simply was not possible before.

But at the center of all of it is the same truth: As Ma puts it, “Research computing is unseen, but it’s so essential.”

This story was originally published by UMass Amherst Information Technology in May 2026.