SOLVING MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE

How do galaxies and black holes evolve? Dr. Peter Behroozi, Assistant Professor of Astronomy, is developing physical models from observational data to answer this question. He simulates universes based on those models and then compares them back to observations. The Department of Astronomy recruited him to the UA from Stanford with the promise of priority access to approximately a quarter million CPU hours a month in the Research Data Center.

STUDENT SOARS WITH RESEARCH COMPUTING RESOURCES

Ariella Gladstein was an Ecology and Evolutionary Biology PhD student with a problem: “I didn’t have a research grant.” Her research involved complex simulations of genomes to infer population histories requiring high performance computing power. As the Ocelote HPC system in the Research Data Center is available to all students at no charge, she was able to run six million hours of processing and complete her doctorate in June 2018.

WHAT IS HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING?

High-performance computing provides massive processing power so researchers can run computing jobs exponentially faster. The Research Data Center’s Ocelote system contains 11,000 cores (processors), compared to 2 or 4 cores in a typical laptop. Time on this system is available at no charge to all UA faculty, researchers, students, and staff. Researchers can also purchase additional cores for the system (“buy in”) for high-priority access to those resources; this extra processing power is also available to other users when idle.

UA LEADS IN REGULATED RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT (CUI)

UITS and Research, Discovery, & Innovation implemented a Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) environment that complies with the new federal government requirements for sensitive data handling. UA is one of the few universities in the country to provide a CUI service to faculty, a significant benefit for recruiting top talent.

SCIENCE DMZ HIGH SPEED CONNECTION

UITS worked with the UA’s Data Science Institute to connect the Science DMZ directly with Arizona’s Sun Corridor Network (Internet2 high-speed research and education network). The Science DMZ allows scientists to rapidly move massive amounts of data between institutions, bypassing the campus network.