Research Computing Center

RCC currently has a small experimental Hadoop cluster. The cluster, running Cloudera 5.4.9-1 Hadoop distribution, consists of 4 VMs, each with 32Gb of RAM and 16 cores; 1 name node and 3 data nodes; and 15 TB of disk storage (effectively 5 TB of usable storage given HDFS replication factor of 3) on top of the Ceph file system.

Please, let us know if you are interested in using Hadoop@RCC. We plan to upgrade the existing cluster to more powerful hardware soon

Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) is an NSF-funded collection of computing clusters. XSEDE clusters suport all kinds of traditional HPC and non-traditional scientific computing approaches: MPI, OpenMP, GPU, Intel Phi, Hadoop, VMs, containers, etc. For an overview of the available resources see this link.

The Research Computing Center (RCC) supports data-intensive research at the University of Chicago by providing centrally managed storage resources for hosting large research data sets. By making commonly used research data sets accessible through a centralized storage system, the RCC is able to provide researchers with the data they need without the overhead of storing and managing the repository themselves.

Network and inter-network infrastructure is a critical building block for the application of high-performance data-intensive research. The ability to move large quantities of data to and from data centers, laboratory research instrumentation, and both local and remote data repositories/servers can make or break a research workflow. The Research Computing Center (RCC) is continually working with the University of Chicago’s IT Services office to ensure the highest levels of network connectivity to our resources.

Since 2012, the RCC’s Data Visualization Lab has served as the hub of data analysis, visualization, and technology-enabled pedagogy at the University of Chicago. Located in the Kathleen A. Zar room of the Crerar Science Library, the lab is home to a suite of visualization resources.

Quality software is integral to effective high-performance computing. The Research Computing Center (RCC) installs, configures, and maintains hundreds of software packages on the RCC cluster, Midway.

The Research Computing Center (RCC) hosts and maintains a number of storage systems. RCC users have access to both persistent high-capacity storage that can be shared among a research group or remain private to each individual user and to high-performance storage when data needs to be temporarily staged and accessed quickly.

Midway2, a professionally-managed high performance computing cluster forms the second generation core of the Research Computing Center’s (RCC) advanced computational infrastructure. The first generation cluster, Midway, was decommissioned at the beginning of 2019. Midway2 includes a large pool of servers, software, and storage that researchers can utilize to increase the efficiency and scale of their computational science.

The Research Computing Center (RCC) provides access to high-end computing and visualization resources, secure computing environment, high-capacity storage and backup, software, high-speed networking, and hosted data sets.