Purdue research computing — 49x return; 55% of $443.5M FY2020 R&D attributable to RCAC HPC users

Smith's 2022 Purdue dissertation and the 2024 SN Computer Science publication apply a production-function model to the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing's institutional HPC investment. In FY2020, 55% of $443.5 million in total Purdue research expenditures — $242 million — was attributable to faculty using campus HPC resources operated by RCAC, producing a 49-fold return on RCAC investment.

For C-0031: Purdue's 49x figure sits in the middle of the documented ROI range developed in C-0031 (5x ADS, 7x NCRIS, 18-88x XSEDE, 20-26x EMBL-EBI, 800x PDB). The Purdue case is methodologically distinctive because it uses a production-function model fit to per-institution data rather than aggregate program-level estimates, which makes the result directly applicable to institution-level capital-allocation decisions. Tier 3 deployment is a small fraction of typical RCAC-class infrastructure investment, so the marginal-cost economics in C-0006 fit comfortably inside the existing return profile demonstrated by Purdue and similar institutional HPC programs.