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). The workshop invited professionals involved in operating and supporting campus shared research computing infrastructure to share experiences and expertise.
Research IT Associate Director Patrick Schmitz participated on a panel sharing experiences developing new research computing services, and condominium models like the new Savio cluster at Berkeley. Schmitz also presented a tongue-in-cheek contrarian lightning talk titled How to exclude Humanist and Social Science Researchers from Research Computing (
How_to_exclude_SS_and_DH_ARCC_March2015.pdf). Schmitz described how Research IT has engaged with faculty, graduate students, and Berkeley's Dean of Arts and Humanities over the past eight years to build context and connections across many disciplines and institutions. Conference participants were eager to understand how this engagement -- combined with a track record of partnership on Digital Humanities projects, support for student engagement, and diversification of Research IT to include staff with humanities backgrounds -- became a foundation on which the unit is able to tailor computing support for research needs specific to humanist inquiry.