Yottabyte Research Cloud able to accept HIPAA-aligned data

By | General Interest, HPC, News

Advanced Research Computing – Technology Services (ARC-TS) is pleased to announce that the Yottabyte Research Cloud (YBRC) computing platform is now HIPAA-compliant. This means that YBRC and its associated services can accept restricted data, enabling secure data analysis on Windows and Linux virtual desktops as well as secure hosting of databases and data ingestion.

The new capability ensures the security of restricted data through the creation of firewalled network enclaves, allowing HIPAA-aligned data to be analyzed safely and securely in YBRC’s flexible, robust and scalable environment.   Within each network enclave, researchers have access to Windows and Linux virtual desktops that can contain any software required for their analysis pipeline.

This capability also extends to our database and ingestion services:

  • Structured databases:  MySQL/MariaDB, and PostgreSQL.
  • Unstructured databases: Cassandra, MongoDB, InfluxDB, Grafana, and ElasticSearch.
  • Data ingestion: Redis, Kafka, RabbitMQ.
  • Data processing: Apache Flink, Apache Storm, Node.js and Apache NiFi.
  • Other data services are available upon request.

YBRC is supported by U-M’s Data Science Initiative launched in 2015. YBRC was created through a partnership between Yottabyte and ARC-TS announced last fall.

These tools are offered to all researchers at the University of Michigan free of charge, provided that certain usage restrictions are not exceeded. Large-scale users who outgrow the no-cost allotment may purchase additional YBRC resources. All interested parties should contact hpc-support@umich.edu.

ARC Director Sharon Broude Geva re-elected vice-chair of Coalition for Academic Scientific Computing

By | General Interest, News

Sharon Broude Geva, the Director of Advanced Research Computing at the University of Michigan, has been re-elected vice-chair of the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC).

Founded in 1989, CASC advocates for the use of advanced computing technology to accelerate scientific discovery for national competitiveness, global security, and economic success. The organization’s members represent 84 institutions of higher education and national labs.

The vice-chair position is one of four elected CASC executive officers. The officers work closely as a team with the director of CASC. The vice-chair also leads CASC meeting program committees, is responsible for recruitment of new members, substitutes for the chair in his or her absences, and assists with moderating CASC meetings.

Geva served as CASC secretary in 2015 and 2016, and one term as vice-chair in 2017. Her next term as vice-chair is effective for the 2018 calendar year.

The other executive officers for 2017 are are Rajendra Bose, Chair, Columbia University; Neil Bright, Secretary, Georgia Institute of Technology; and Andrew Sherman, Treasurer, Yale University. Curt Hillegas of Princeton University is immediate past chair.

The 2018 CASC brochure is available online.

U-M wraps up successful SC17 conference

By | General Interest, Happenings, HPC, News

Several University of Michigan researchers and professional IT staff attended the Supercomputing 17 (SC17) conference in Denver from Nov. 12-17, participating in a number of different ways, including demonstrations, presentations and tutorials.

U-M participation included:

  • Matt McLean, a Big Data systems administrator with ARC-TS, served as a panelist at a session titled “The ARM Software Ecosystem: Are We There Yet?” (Slides)
  • Jeff Sica, a research database administrator with ARC-TS, helped lead a Birds of a Feather session titled “Containers in HPC.” (Slides)
  • Quentin Stout (EECS) and Christiane Jablonowski (CLASP) taught the “Parallel Computing 101” tutorial.
  • Shawn McKee, U-M Department of Physics, and OSiRIS Principal Investigator, demonstrated Object Storage and Caching for Science (network topology diagrams)
  • Eric Boyd, Director of Research Networks, presented on Research Networking at the University of Michigan at the U-M exhibit booth.
  • Simon Adorf, Ph.D. Candidate, Chemical Engineering Department, U-M, presented on Simple Data and Workflow Management with Signac and GPU-Accelerated Predictive Material Design at the U-M exhibit booth.
  • ARC sponsored a networking and career networking reception put on by Women in HPC. ARC Director Sharon Broude Geva spoke at the event.
  • Amy Liebowitz, a network architect at ITS, worked on SCINet, a high-capacity network created every year for the conference. Liebowitz was on the routing team, which is responsible for installing, configuring and supporting the high performance conference network. The Routing Team also coordinated external connectivity with commodity Internet and R&E WAN service providers.

Reading and discussion group:  Data science in understanding and addressing climate change 

By | Educational, Events, General Interest, Happenings

CSCAR announces a reading and discussion group Data science in understanding and addressing climate change that will meet on the third or fourth (depending on the preferences of participants) Friday of every month between 3 and 5 pm. We will discuss reports and significant papers that illuminate fundamental issues in climate change science, policy, and management. The suggested format at this stage is that we discuss one science and one policy (or management) paper or chapter. The focus will be on the spatial (and temporal) dimensions of the issue and we will concentrate more on methods and techniques keeping the requirement for domain knowledge relatively low. We will lay emphasis on the conceptual part of the tools and techniques so that it is accessible to a wider set of participants, but will also get into the technical details.

This is an effort to bring people involved in climate change together from a data science perspective. The idea is to learn together in a fun environment and foster dialogue with a focus on how data science can provide the common ground for mutual learning and understanding.

 We will meet in Rackham, but we will be open to rotating the location. You will be able to participate remotely, if you choose to.

 If you are interested send an email to Manish Verma at manishve@umich.edu

 If you have any suggestion for discussion and reading let us know.  We will include chapters from the IPCC and US global change science programs in our discussion.

U-M partners with Cavium on Big Data computing platform

By | Feature, General Interest, Happenings, HPC, News

A new partnership between the University of Michigan and Cavium Inc., a San Jose-based provider of semiconductor products, will create a powerful new Big Data computing cluster available to all U-M researchers.

The $3.5 million ThunderX computing cluster will enable U-M researchers to, for example, process massive amounts of data generated by remote sensors in distributed manufacturing environments, or by test fleets of automated and connected vehicles.

The cluster will run the Hortonworks Data Platform providing Spark, Hadoop MapReduce and other tools for large-scale data processing.

“U-M scientists are conducting groundbreaking research in Big Data already, in areas like connected and automated transportation, learning analytics, precision medicine and social science. This partnership with Cavium will accelerate the pace of data-driven research and opening up new avenues of inquiry,” said Eric Michielssen, U-M associate vice president for advanced research computing and the Louise Ganiard Johnson Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

“I know from experience that U-M researchers are capable of amazing discoveries. Cavium is honored to help break new ground in Big Data research at one of the top universities in the world,” said Cavium founder and CEO Syed Ali, who received a master of science in electrical engineering from U-M in 1981.

Cavium Inc. is a leading provider of semiconductor products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, wired and wireless networking. The new U-M system will use dual socket servers powered by Cavium’s ThunderX ARMv8-A workload optimized processors.

The ThunderX product family is Cavium’s 64-bit ARMv8-A server processor for next generation Data Center and Cloud applications, and features high performance custom cores, single and dual socket configurations, high memory bandwidth and large memory capacity.

Alec Gallimore, the Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering at U-M, said the Cavium partnership represents a milestone in the development of the College of Engineering and the university.

“It is clear that the ability to rapidly gain insights into vast amounts of data is key to the next wave of engineering and science breakthroughs. Without a doubt, the Cavium platform will allow our faculty and researchers to harness the power of Big Data, both in the classroom and in their research,” said Gallimore, who is also the Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner Professor, an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, and a professor both of aerospace engineering and of applied physics.

Along with applications in fields like manufacturing and transportation, the platform will enable researchers in the social, health and information sciences to more easily mine large, structured and unstructured datasets. This will eventually allow, for example, researchers to discover correlations between health outcomes and disease outbreaks with information derived from socioeconomic, geospatial and environmental data streams.

U-M and Cavium chose to run the cluster on Hortonworks Data Platform, which is based on open source Apache Hadoop. The ThunderX cluster will deliver high performance computer services for the Hadoop analytics and, ultimately, a total of three petabytes of storage space.

“Hortonworks is excited to be a part of forward-leading research at the University of Michigan exploring low-powered, high-performance computing,” said Nadeem Asghar, vice president and global head of technical alliances at Hortonworks. “We see this as a great opportunity to further expand the platform and segment enablement for Hortonworks and the ARM community.”

CSCAR provides walk-in support for new Flux users

By | Data, Educational, Flux, General Interest, HPC, News

CSCAR now provides walk-in support during business hours for students, faculty, and staff seeking assistance in getting started with the Flux computing environment.  CSCAR consultants can walk a researcher through the steps of applying for a Flux account, installing and configuring a terminal client, connecting to Flux, basic SSH and Unix command line, and obtaining or accessing allocations.  

In addition to walk-in support, CSCAR has several staff consultants with expertise in advanced and high performance computing who can work with clients on a variety of topics such as installing, optimizing, and profiling code.  

Support via email is also provided via hpc-support@umich.edu.  

CSCAR is located in room 3550 of the Rackham Building (915 E. Washington St.). Walk-in hours are from 9 a.m. – 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, except for noon – 1 p.m. on Tuesdays.

See the CSCAR web site (cscar.research.umich.edu) for more information.

Info session: Consulting and computing resources for data science — Nov. 8

By | Data, Educational, Events, General Interest, Happenings, HPC

Advanced Research Computing at U-M (ARC) will host an information session for graduate students in all disciplines who are interested in new computing and data science resources and services available to U-M researchers.

Brief presentations from members of ARC Technology Services (ARC-TS) on computing infrastructure, and from Consulting for Statistics, Computing, and Analytics Research (CSCAR) on statistics, data science, and computing training and consulting will be followed by a Q&A session, and opportunities to interact individually with ARC and CSCAR staff.

ARC and CSCAR are interested in connecting with graduate students whose research would benefit from customized or innovative computational or analytic approaches, and can provide guidance for students aiming to do this. ARC and CSCAR are also interested in developing training and documentation materials for a diverse range of application areas, and would welcome input from student researchers on opportunities to tailor our training offerings to new areas.

Speakers:

  • Kerby Shedden, Director, CSCAR
  • Brock Palen, Director, ARC-TS

Date/Time/Location:

Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2017, 2 – 4 p.m., West Conference Room, 4th Floor, Rackham Building (915 E. Washington St.)

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