News

This spring, a cross-departmental project team is forming to provide guidance and recommendations to the campus about existing and much-needed services for securing research data.

Software is as important as data when it comes to building upon existing scholarship. However, while there has been a small amount of research into how researchers find, adopt, and credit software, there is currently a lack of empirical data on how researchers use, share, and value software and computer code.

An initial cohort of Berkeley researchers has already made productive use of an experimental, powerfully-provisioned server loaned to UC Berkeley by the Pacific Research Platform (PRP) project and configured with JupyterHub.

Research IT is seeking a talented current UC Berkeley undergraduate or graduate student student to join our team as a Writing/Storytelling Intern, to help us develop news stories / case studies about how researchers use computing, to be published on the Research IT website and other campus news outlets.

Research IT Director David Greenbaum and Digital Humanities Coordinator Quinn Dombrowski represented UC Berkeley among the presentations at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) winter meeting in Washington, D.C. on December 12-13.

UC Berkeley’s Research IT group participated in the 2016 Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment (MSDSE) Summit, held in New York from October 23-26.

Much of the UC Berkeley campus will be closed, or operating on modified schedules, during the Holiday Energy Curtailment period from December 26, 2016 to January 2, 2017.

Research IT services and support will be operating during this period as follows:

Maurice Manning has recently joined Berkeley's Research IT team as a cyberinfrastructure engineer (CIE), supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, and has already begun to make an impact supporting multiple research teams on campus.

Initial Engagements

We are very happy to publicly thank Jamie Wittenberg, our Research Data Management Program Director, whose last day at UC Berkeley is December 16, 2016.

On November 10, 2016, Research IT staff from across the University of California system met at UC Irvine to discuss trends in research computing and opportunities for collaboration. The one-day session was facilitated by David Greenbaum (UC Berkeley) and Christine Kirkpatrick (UC San Diego). Patrick Schmitz, Chris Hoffman, and Maurice Manning also represented Berkeley.

For researchers running computation on the Savio high-performance compute cluster, data transfer can be a challenge. A new IPython notebook simplifies data transfer from the free Box collaboration platform to a Savio user’s scratch folder, and provides a template for users to develop their own algorithms that analyze data stored in Box.

A childhood filled with Lego blocks, nature documentaries, science fiction novels, and some amazing science teachers led Evan Lyall to know that he wanted to study Bioengineering in college, but left him unsure of the direction he should go with that training.

October 20th marked the third semiannual Consulting Summit at BIDS, which brought together individuals from over twenty organizations that provide some variety of “consulting” around research and/or teaching. 40% of the participants indicated that it was their first Consulting Summit.

Berkeley Research Computing (BRC) is launching a new Condo Storage service for Savio condo partners who need very large, persistent storage capability at a reasonable price.

“I have always believed in following the science,” says Stephen Floor, a postdoctoral researcher in the Doudna Lab, led by UC Berkeley Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Jennifer Doudna. Floor’s self-described “circuitous” academic journey has taken him from computer science, to physics, and now, to molecular biology.

Faculty contributions drove this year’s increase in computational capacity on Savio, the Berkeley Research Computing (BRC) Program’s shared High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster.