Town Hall spotlights new services for researchers, Savio expansion

October 2, 2015
Aron D. Roberts

Two new services -- in cloud computing and research data management, each offering free consulting help for campus researchers -- were spotlighted in a Town Hall on September 24, 2015, hosted by Research IT. Presentations at the Town Hall also previewed expansion of the campus’s Savio computing cluster, and provided an update on the Berkeley Research Computing (BRC) program's Faculty Computing Allowance. Slides and videos from the event are now available (see below).

Highlights of the Town Hall include presentations on:

  • A recently-launched Cloud Computing Support service, providing consulting services, documentation, and tools. The service assists campus users with selection of and access to commercial cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, as well as to cloud-like services offered by national computational centers such as XSEDE and NERSC.
  • A new Research Data Management (RDM) program, providing a consulting service (researchdata@berkeley.edu) to assist campus researchers in managing many aspects of the research data lifecycle, including planning, security, collaboration, sharing, and preservation. The program also offers an online Service Guide, which describes available resources and best practices. RDM is a partnership between Research IT, UC Berkeley’s Library, and the California Digital Library.
  • Upcoming hardware expansions to Savio, Berkeley’s high performance computing cluster. These include 72 new compute nodes equipped with Intel Haswell processors; and six graphics processor (GPU) nodes, each with four Nvidia GPUs. A further expansion with 12 specialized nodes for running single-core, transactional/serial jobs, and offering faster CPUs, large amounts of memory, and fast local SSD storage, will also be made available soon for experimentation by early adopters.
  • The Faculty Computing Allowance, which offers campus faculty annual allowances of fully-subsidized computation on Savio. Forty-three faculty members, along with their postdocs, grad students, and other affiliates, are already taking advantage of these allowances to run their research computation on the cluster. The program has enjoyed an enthusiastic response, and many additional faculty have applied for access.

Presentation videos (posted to YouTube) and slide decks (in PDF format) from the Town Hall are available for review:

We encourage and welcome Berkeley faculty, post-docs, grad students, and research staff with questions or interest in taking advantage of any of these services to contact Research IT at research-it@berkeley.edu.

Links and contact information referenced in presentations