Wake Forest University's Distributed Environment for Academic Computing (DEAC) is a centrally funded, High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster that is available as a free resource for University faculty and students to conduct research. While many Universities have multiple HPC clusters that each support a singular department, the DEAC cluster singularly supports ~300 users across nine departments. Discussion will include a brief review of the cluster's sixteen year history, a high level overview of our funding model and it's resulting affect on our hardware architecture. Cluster usage, research software, and support tools will also be discussed as attendees are shown why this model has worked for Wake Forest. Attendees should have basic knowledge of HPC and will takeaway thoughts on policy and approach to research support at their institutions.
