The design and deployment of Virginia Tech's terascale computing cluster is described. The goal of this project is to demonstrate that world-class on-campus supercomputing is possible and affordable, and to explore the resulting benefits for an academic community consisting of both computational scientists and computer science researchers and students. Computer science research in high performance computing systems benefits significantly from hands-on access to this system and from close collaborations with the local computational science user community. We describe an example of this computer science research, in the area of dynamically resizable parallel applications.