A summary of recent news, researcher profiles, and Berkeley Research Computing program impact was e-mailed last week to faculty, researchers, students, and staff who make use of BRC services. We're posting the summary here in Research IT's news feed for those not on BRC's mailing list:
New and updated BRC Services for campus researchers
- We launched the Condo Storage service, for Savio condo partners who need very large, persistent storage capability at a reasonable price.
- We increased the Faculty Computing Allowance by 50%, to 300,000 SUs/year.
- There is a new Instructional Computing Allowance pilot, with initial partners helping to define what is needed to make these course partnerships work well.
BRC Researchers featured in profiles and reports
- A new series of profiles describes the work of campus researchers, and how BRC services support their research. From Astrophysics to Genomics to Digital Humanities, BRC researchers are doing amazing work and expanding the bounds of computational research.
- The Coalition for Academic Scientific Computing (CASC) featured Berkeley research in their 2016 brochure (see Prof. Rita Lucarelli’s work on photogrammetry, p15, and Alexander Tchekhovskoy’s work on Black hole physics, p18). A more in-depth story on the work with Prof. Lucarelli (“Mummies in the Supercomputer”) appears in the 2016 CIO Report (see the full report here).
If you or one of your colleagues are doing research we could profile, please let us know!
Campus Impact of BRC services documented
We track a range of measures to understand the impact our services have on campus, from the roughly $600 million in grants we support, to hundreds of publications, to the 15 faculty recruitment and retention cases we’ve supported. A report of this impact is now available on our website, and we’re working on a summary page on the site (coming soon).
New people on the team
- A new Cyberinfrastructure Engineer, Maurice Manning, is helping research teams to scale their research workflows.
- Deb McCaffrey, a recent PhD in Physical Chemistry, is our newest Domain Consultant, joining Chris Paciorek, Kelly Rowland, and the rest of the BRC Consulting team.
- Student interns continue to do great working supporting and extending BRC services, and learn about research computing and professional skills along the way: Olivia Habern wrote many of our researcher profiles, and our Spring 2017 interns are doing everything from container computing support to user experience and visualization development.
Looking ahead
We’re currently working with our sponsors to renew program support for the next few years, so we can continue to support your work, and keep adding new services to meet your emerging needs. We expect to continue our collaboration with the Research Data Management program; an emphasis this year is support for secure data and computing services.
Thanks from all of us for your continued engagement, and let us know if you’d like any more information on any aspect of the program, at research-it@berkeley.edu.