News

Members of UC Berkeley’s Research IT group joined CIO Larry Conrad, University Librarian Tom Leonard, and staff from the Office of the VCR at a system-wide summit held on the UCLA Campus this past March.

Like The Blob in a 1950s B-movie, data grows ever larger with time. That’s what UC Berkeley’s researchers are finding as they work with data generated by new generations of instruments and high-resolution sensors, as well as increasingly monstrous datasets. Brain scans from high resolution CCD cameras, images from remote telescopes, and high frequency stock trading and quotation datasets are just a few examples of this data’s diversity.

On May 5th, several members of Research IT participated in the Spring 2015 Data Science Faire at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science.

Berkeley’s new High Performance Computing Condo Cluster has expanded rapidly in the first nine months of its operation, with hardware contributions to Savio from faculty in the physical, biological, and social sciences more than doubling the cluster’s initial size.

Seventy people crowded into a meeting room in Doe Library on Monday, May 11th for a Research Data Management (RDM) workshop on "Information, Input and Community." The first in a series of planned workshops was organized by the joint Library/Research IT/California Digital Library RDM service team, and was attended by librarians, information technology support staff, and research service providers.

Applications are open for the first Digital Humanities at Berkeley Summer Institute. From August 17 - 21, the Institute will offer five week-long, intensive workshops in the following tracks:

During spring 2015, two student assistants have joined Research IT. Taliah Mirmalek has been providing administrative support for the Digital Humanities at Berkeley initiative, and Maelia DuBois has been implementing technical improvements to the Research IT website.

On April 7th and 8th, Berkeley’s digital humanities community gathered to share research and celebrate an exciting year of forging new collaborations.

Members of the CollectionSpace community at UC Berkeley are actively participating in working groups recently formed by Atlanta-based non-profit LYRASIS, the software’s organizational home. Berkeley, with five major campus collections cataloged and managed using this system, plays a significant role in the ongoing effort to sustain and expand CollectionSpace in the museum community.

Berkeley Research Computing staff members Yong Qin and Michael Jennings gave talks highlighting their respective software tools, wwibcheck and NHC, at the DellXL High Performance Computing (HPC) conference this week, April 21-23, 2015, in Boulder, Colorado (

UC Berkeley’s Research IT group was invited to participate in the ARCC Workshop hosted by Clemson University in March of this year. The workshop was presented in partnership with the NSF-sponsored program for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Research and Education Facilitators (ACI-REF) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

Research IT staff have completed work on a $150,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a variety of new features and integrations for the DiRT (Digital Research Tools) directory, and transition the project to a new organizational home.

The Berkeley Prosopography Services (BPS) project has received funding from the Digital Humanities at Berkeley program to support integration with data encoded using Epidoc, a standard used by the Center for Tebtunis Papyri 

Members of the UC Berkeley digital humanities community gathered together with patrons of the Magnes Collection to celebrate the opening of a new exhibit, "The Future of Memory: Jewish Culture in the Digital Age”, as well as the kick-off of the 

Intel is sponsoring a free one-day in-depth training on the Xeon Phi Coprocessor to be held at Perseverance Hall (LBNL, Building 54) on March 27th, 2015 from 9:00am to 4:00pm.

John Lowe has accepted the role of technical lead and manager for the CollectionSpace service at UC Berkeley. CollectionSpace is an open-source collections information management system used by five UC Berkeley museums, and other museums around the world.

OneIT teams from Educational Technology Services (ETS) and Information Technology Services (IST) invite the campus to a Town Hall  on March 12th to discuss content collaboration tools on the UC Berkeley campus.

Digital Humanities at Berkeley, a Mellon-funded program supported by Research IT, will be holding a launch event at the Magnes Collection on February 18 from 5-8 PM.

Research IT Associate Director Patrick Schmitz and Berkeley Prosopography Services co-director, Laurie Pearce (Near Eastern Studies), have been awarded a Resarch Seminar Grant by the Social Science Matrix.

On Monday, January 26, Research IT, the D-Lab and the Berkeley Institute for Data Sciences (BIDS) hosted a workshop to bring together groups who offer consultation services to campus researchers.