The Center for Research Computing promotes the following benefits:
Enhance University research agenda. Enhance advanced research agendas across campus through the availability and use of state of the art high end computing and communication infrastructure and associated resources, especially skilled technical computing staff.
Enable collaborations across disciplines. High-performance computing has a major impact in many areas of science engineering and the arts. There are a wide variety of important problems to which these computational hardware, infrastructure, expertise and software resources can be usefully applied. Efficient sharing of these resources maximizes the benefit to the whole University while increasing the likelihood that any particular field, such as biological complexity, will have available a mélange of expertise that can attack problems in creative and potentially unique ways. The Center for Research Computing (CRC) is a platform for an exchange of expertise, ideas, and resources from many different disciplines.
Provide system administration, user support and training. In order to make efficient use of the investment in hardware, shorten response times, and help researchers explore new applications of high-performance computing in the respective areas, it is important that the user support through highly qualified system administrators is close to the research groups.The CRC provides access to training for high performance computing tools and in software design to efficiently use the available hardware and infrastructure.
Supply resources for hardware, software, and data storage. The combination of resources across many academic units on campus exploits economy of scale and allows quick responses to the rapidly changing environment of high performance computing and emerging research areas. The CRC is the primary resource for these high-end computing needs on campus.
Leverage university investment. Ad-hoc groups of researchers that need high performance computing resources have been very successful in attracting external funding, leading to the creation of the TOP500 computing cluster BoB in 2001 and its upgrade in 2004. The CRC has an organizational structure designed to aggressively pursue external funding such as the NSF-MRI or DOE initiatives, and for new research initiatives that result from the collaborations within the center. The resources, expertise and outreach programs of the CRC leads to an increase in the success rate of individual researchers that depend on high-performance computing. These resources complement the university’s investment.