UCF Research Cyberinfrastructure (RCI)

Thanks to the Office of Research, UCF is now providing unlimited campus wide access to MATLAB, Simulink, and additional MathWorks products on and off campus, on any device. This suite of products supports all students, educators, and researchers within UCF. This campus-wide license includes analysis, design, modeling, simulation, code generation, and testing products for the engineering and science schools, plus computational finance for the business and economic schools. A complete list of products provided can be found here. An @knights.ucf.edu or @ucf.edu work email is required to access the MATLAB download.

For Spring 2023, we are pleased to bring to the UCF Research community a series of workshops on scientific computing and research data management. These workshops are being jointly presented by UCF Library, UCF Graduate and Research IT, and UCF Advanced Research Computing Center (ARCC). Spring 2023 workshops run January through April. View upcoming workshops here: link.

"Whereas a typical IT department would set up general-purpose tools and areas that anyone can use, our team supports research," says Chaudhry. For example, she says, every project must be considered on a granular level, looking at what capabilities the researcher needs – such as the ability to collaborate with other institutions – and how the data needs to be formatted.

Full story

With data scientists in increasingly high demand, the paper examines some of the key factors that influence career-related decisions for research computing and data professionals.

Full story

The University of Central Florida has a new program called Upwork which will allow UCF researchers and staff to hire trusted professionals to easily complete their projects. Through this program, new talent on your project can be hired in a matter of days without the need to go through UCF procurement or HR as those steps have already been completed. You define a statement of work and receive bids from interested freelancers. Then you can interview and select the professional you would like to hire for your project. All these engagements are tracked through Upwork, including payments to the professional. Examples of talent to hire include Software developers, QA and testing, article writing, graphic designer, project manager, data analyst, game developer, statistician and computational physicist.

Thanks to the Jump Start Fund of President Cartwright's 2021-2022 Strategic Investment Program, the Advanced Research Computing Center's team has installed 36 new 48-core nodes to Stokes to provide a total of 5,816 cores! Each node has 256GB of RAM and 100Gbps HDR InfiniBand, available to serve the general-purpose computational needs of UCF researchers.

A collaboration among UCF, the Arecibo Observatory and others wins Best High-Performance Computing (HPC) Collaboration Recognition for their efforts to preserve 50 years of data at the observatory.

Full story by Zenaida Gonzalez Kotala

We are excited to share that two of the 17 teams who were awarded the Jump Start Award from President Cartwright's strategic investment program are focused on enhancing UCF's research cyberinfrastructure.

Excerpt from UCF News by Zenaida Gonzalez Kotala below; full article available here.

---

Enabling Big Data and Computational Science via High-Throughput Networking

Lead: Dr. Shafaq Chaudhry, Assistant Director, Graduate and Research Information Technology

Contributors:

• Dr. Fahad Khan, Research Cyberinfrastructure Consultant
• Michael Scruggs, Associate VP, Deputy CIO & CTO

Award: $500,000, with $70,000 match

The funds will be invested in UCF's cyberinfrastructure, building up three identified gaps in network support by a) increasing the overall campus network backbone to 100 Gbps; b) increasing our capacity for connection to the collaborative Internet2 research network to 100 Gbps; and c) allowing more labs to access the Advanced Research Computing Center (ARCC). These improvements are expected to enhance UCF's capabilities across all forms of big-data research, providing the knowledge and connectivity necessary for us to forge our path as a leading public metropolitan research university. The Office of Research will provide a two-year $50,000 match in support of cloud connectivity, and a $20,000 annual match in support of data transfer functionality.

---

Enhancement to the Stokes High-Performance Computing Cluster, Supporting Cross-Campus General-Purpose Research Computing

Lead: Dr. Glenn Martin, research associate professor and lab director of Interactive Realities Laboratory, School of Modeling Simulation and Training

Award: $495,085, with $200,000 match

The money will be used to upgrade access to computational science research on campus. UCF has been using the Stokes high-performance computing cluster for the 15 years, which gives faculty and students capabilities to design, implement, and use mathematical models to analyze and solve a variety of scientific problems. The system needs updating to keep up with age and demand. The money will purchase modern equipment that will add 60 nodes to replace aging nodes used now. Stokes supports computational research across UCF with users coming from almost every college. In addition, computational research in various domains is increasing and provides a great opportunity for expanding research while requiring little additional space. Each month, multiple users from multiple lab groups across campus use Stokes for their research.

In 2021, we are pleased to bring to the UCF Research community a series of workshops on scientific computing and research data management. These workshops are being jointly presented by UCF Library, UCF Graduate and Research IT, and UCF Advanced Research Computing Center (ARCC). Please check back for new/updated information.

The UCF Advanced Research Computing Center (ARCC) is pleased to announce a new file server to support research workloads where read I/O can be a significant bottleneck, such as GPU-based deep-learning tasks related to computer vision. The NVME-based file server hosts curated datasets for fast, read-only processing. This resource was made possible by contributions from the ARCC and Dr. Mubarak Shah from the Center for Research in Computer Vision. Please contact the ARCC team at arcc-team@ist.ucf.edu to see whether your research group can benefit from this resource for hosting your dataset.

If you have a need to share your research data files with external collaborators or wish to transfer large datasets to the computing clusters at UCF Advanced Research Computing Center (ARCC) or national resources like XSEDE, you can use Globus/GridFTP. The site-wide Globus subscription is being sponsored by Office of Research. For more information on how to use Globus with ARCC resources, please visit: https://arcc.ist.ucf.edu/index.php/help/tutorials/globus-gridftp Note, at this time this service is not available for regulated data.