Information Technology News

Office of Research IT

The Office of Research Information Technology group (OR IT), now part of OIT,  goes well beyond managing servers and sustaining a robust IT infrastructure for administration of campus research.  The entire process of shepherding research proposals from initial review, through Contracts and Grants, and finally to the various funding agencies is handled electronically using tools developed and managed by OR IT.  OR systems process between 5,000 and 6,000 new grant proposals, and manage between 3,000 and 4,000 current awards totaling $320 million in a year.

OR IT programmers, along with Accounting, OIT, and Research Administration staff, are also working on the implementation of the Proposal and Budget building module of the Kuali Coeus system.  Kuali Coeus is based on the MIT Coeus system, which is an open-source solution for research grant submission and administration currently in use by 50 universities.

OR IT maintains the Faculty Profile system which allows UCI researchers to maintain an online curriculum vitae, and identifies campus experts who can meet various public and media needs.

OR IT also supports the activities of key OR subunits, including University Lab Animal Resources (which cares for university research animals), the Office of Technology Alliances (which connects primary UCI research results to corporations which can develop and market them), the Institutional Review Board (which is responsible for ensuring UCI researchers comply with regulations for human subjects research), and UCI’s new Stem Cell Research Center.

As part of OIT, OR IT will now have access to additional expertise and resources to support this vital area of activity.

Broadcom Donations Support Research Computing

The Broadcom Corporation is a generous donor of computing equipment to UCI.  Following its contribution of hundreds of rack-mounted compute servers in 2007, two subsequent donations of compute servers and disk storage have benefited UCI and other UC campuses.

Among the service improvements the recent Broadcom contributions have made possible are research computing equipment for the Bren School of ICS, expansion of the space available for faculty and staff email storage (increased disk quotas), augmentation of the MPC and BDUC compute clusters available to all campus researchers, and an upcoming application server.  This will allow the use of a remote-access tool (e.g. Windows Terminal) to run research software (e.g. Matlab or SAS) remotely.  The server will be highlighted in a subsequent issue of IT News.

In these times of reduced state funding, Broadcom’s ongoing support of UCI is deeply appreciated.

Greenplanet: Cluster Computing for Physical Sciences

Physical Sciences, with support from IAT-NACS, has assembled a high-performance computing cluster for climate modeling and other computational-intensive research.

Called “Greenplanet,” the cluster comprises nodes purchased by faculty in Earth Systems Sciences (ESS), Chemistry, and Physics, and it is expected that Math faculty will also participate.  At this time, Greenplanet includes almost 900 CPUs and is still growing.

IAT provides secure, climate-controlled space in the Academic Data Center,  system administration services as a team with Physical Sciences IT staff, and consultation on code parallelization and optimization.

According to Assistant Professor Keith Moore of ESS, Greenplanet is “a flexible cluster, suitable for massively parallel complex computations (such as climate simulations), and for smaller-scale use on a single node as a workstation.”

A typical node features 8 64-bit Intel CPUs.  Greenplanet features the Load Sharing Facility (LSF) for job management and the Lustre caching file system for extremely high-performance access to the large datasets typical of climate modeling.  Two message passing techniques are available for parallel code: OpenMP for communication between CPUs on a node, and MPI for communication between CPUs on different nodes.  Greenplanet also has the high-performance Infiniband interlink between nodes for high-speed communications.  There is extensive instrumentation available for tuning jobs to optimal execution speed and use of all available computational capacity in the cluster.

Software includes the Climate Systems Modeling package, parallel Matlab, and quantum chemistry packages such as Gaussian and Turbomole.

PSearch: NACS and ICS Collaborate

Faculty and staff now have a powerful new tool for finding contacts through UCI’s online phone directory.  PSearch melds the directory data NACS maintains with state-of-the-art database research from the lab of ICS Professor Chen Li.

PSearch allows users to enter whatever information they may happen to have (first name, last name, department, phone number, etc.) and PSearch will offer any entries in the campus phone directory which match.  PSearch is error tolerant (you can find people with only an approximation of the spelling of a name) and real time (results are displayed and refined as you enter information.)

PSearch represents a collaboration between NACS and ICS.  Professor Li’s team offered the intelligent database search technology, and NACS offered the data and our user-interface experience.  Key contributors on Professor Li’s team include PhD student Rares Vernica at UCI and Guoliang Li, a visiting researcher from Tsinghua University, China.

PSearch is only one potential use of Dr. Li’s “type-ahead search” technology featured on his TASTIER project web page.  Future uses may involve other campus-wide or even UC-wide data sets.  This new technology makes it possible to simultaneously support full-text (google), quick-link, and directory searches in a single query as exhibited by the search box on the ICS home page.

New Computing Cluster

Last year, Broadcom graciously donated over 400 compute servers to UC Irvine. While the majority of the servers were distributed to campus researchers, NACS and the Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences have collaborated to bring a new general-purpose campus computing solution to researchers and graduate students at no charge.

Initially, the Broadcom Distributed Unified Cluster (BDUC) is comprised of 80 nodes: 40 nodes with 32-bit Intel processors and 40 nodes with 64-bit AMD processors. Broadcom is expected to donate newer servers over time, allowing nodes to be upgraded.  NACS and ICS plan to further expand the cluster as well, subject to available staff and Data Center resources.

BDUC includes standard open-source compilers, debuggers, and libraries; in addition, the MATLAB Distributed Computing Engine (DCE) will soon be available.  In the near future, BDUC will offer priority queues for research groups that provide financial support or hardware to the cluster.

BDUC is now available to all faculty, staff, and graduate using your UCInetID and password. To request an account, send an e-mail to bduc-request@uci.edu.  A new user how-to guide is available on the NACS website http://www.nacs.uci.edu/computing/bduc/newuser.html.

Saving Money through Strategic Sourcing

In the current budgetary climate, faculty and staff should be aware of the opportunities for saving money on academic software and computer equipment that NACS coordinates.

NACS works with representatives from the other UC campuses to leverage the buying power of the multi-campus system to negotiate a variety of discounted software licensing contracts.  Among the research software for which UCI has licensing programs are the mathematics packages Matlab and Mathematica, the statistical packages SAS and SPSS, and GIS software from ESRI.  You can explore UCI’s software licensing agreements online.

UCI also participates in UC’s Microsoft Consolidated Campus Agreement (MCCA) wherein units can purchase annual licenses for Microsoft software such as Windows and Office for all computers owned by the unit.  NACS can help units determine whether this option fits their needs.  Information on this and other options for purchasing Microsoft software is available online.

Finally, UCI has a strategic sourcing agreement with KST Data which provides discounts on the purchase of new desktop and laptop computers.