On the cutting-edge of research at U-M is the Advanced Genomics Core’s Illumina NovaSeq 6000 sequencing platform. The AGC is one of the first academic core facilities to optimize this exciting and powerful instrument, that is about the size of a large laser printer. The Advanced Genomics Core (AGC), part of the Biomedical Research Core Facilities within the Medical… Read More »
A researcher in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) is pioneering two separate, ongoing efforts for measuring and forecasting COVID-19: pandemic modeling and a risk tracking site. The projects are led by Sabrina Corsetti, a senior undergraduate student pursuing dual degrees in honors physics and mathematical sciences, and supervised by Thomas Schwarz, associate professor of… Read More »
A U-M School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) student team is working with the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge to study how fish move through different wetland habitats. Their work is primarily dependent on being in the field, but in March the pandemic delayed fieldwork. In June, the team of SEAS master students was allowed to begin socially distant… Read More »
The Michigan Aeronautical Science Association (MASA) is a student-run engineering team at U-M that has been designing, building, and launching rockets since its inception in 2003. Since late 2017, MASA has focused on developing liquid-bipropellant rockets—which are rockets that react to a liquid fuel with a liquid oxidizer to produce thrust—in an effort to remain at the forefront… Read More »
As the Mars 2020 launch approaches, a separate effort is using simulations to understand landing dynamics for tomorrow’s missions. Future spacecrafts bound for the moon or beyond will benefit from high-powered computer simulations underway at the University of Michigan that model the particulate mayhem set in motion by rocket thruster-powered landings. During descent, exhaust plumes fluidize surface soil… Read More »
One hundred gigabits per second (Gbps) is the new standard for network speeds when transferring files from the Great Lakes high-performance computing cluster to the Turbo Research Storage service. Why is this significant? Usually network speeds for file transfers are 1Gbps. That’s perfectly fine for most people’s needs. But reaching speeds of 100Gbps represents a new, higher level… Read More »
Advanced Research Computing — Technology Services (ARC-TS) provides advanced, high-performance computing resources to U-M researchers. They recently announced the extension of the free pilot periods for two of its most recently added services: the Great Lakes cluster and the HIPAA-aligned Armis2 cluster. The free pilot for both services has been extended to January 5, 2020. Billing begins on… Read More »
On November 19, 2019, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) named several award winners, including ARC-TS research cloud programmer senior, Bob Killen. Killen was one of six to earn the “Chop Wood Carry Water” award, given to CNCF community members who help behind the scenes, dedicate their time to open source projects, host and build community meetups, and… Read More »
The Armis2 service is the go-to cluster for sensitive data, and is available to all U-M researchers. Key features of Armis2 HIPAA-aligned 24 standard nodes using the Intel Haswell-processor, each with 24 cores. More capacity will be added soon Slurm provides the resource manager and scheduler The scratch storage system will provide high-performance temporary storage for compute jobs.… Read More »
The Great Lakes service is a next generation HPC platform for U-M researchers that will provide several performance advantages compared to Flux, primarily in the areas of storage and networking. ARC-TS recently shared additional details surrounding the timeline for Great Lakes as well as information about Early User testing. What is the current status of Great Lakes? Today, the… Read More »
Eric Michielssen stepped down from his position as associate vice president for research – Advanced Research Computing on December 31, 2018. He served in that leadership role for almost six years. Michielssen will return to his faculty role in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the College of Engineering. Read more on the ARC-TS website:
The Great Lakes service is a next generation HPC platform for U-M researchers that will provide several performance advantages compared to Flux, primarily in the areas of storage and networking. Great Lakes is built around the latest Intel CPU architecture called Skylake, and will have standard, large memory, visualization, and GPU-accelerated nodes. For more information on the technical aspects of… Read More »
New HPC resources to replace Flux and updates to Armis will run a new scheduling system (Slurm). Users will need to learn the commands in this system and update batch files to successfully run jobs. Slurm is expected to bring performance gains, better user communications, and increased reliability that will significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the… Read More »
Sharon Broude Geva, director of Advanced Research Computing at U-M, has been elected chair of the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) for 2019. The chair position is one of four elected CASC executive officers. Geva served as CASC secretary in 2015 and 2016, and vice-chair in 2017 and 2018. Founded in 1989, CASC advocates for the use of advanced… Read More »
U-M has selected Dell EMC as lead vendor to supply its new $4.8 million Great Lakes computing cluster, which will serve researchers across campus. Mellanox Technologies will provide networking solutions, and DDN will supply storage hardware. Great Lakes will be available to the campus community in the first half of 2019, and over time will replace the Flux… Read More »
Recently, ARC-TS and the School of Information used the new Big Data platform Cavium ThunderX to reduce run times of the school’s analytics pipeline by a factor of 10, taking overall run time from almost a week to only a few hours. Cavium ThunderX is a free-to-use Big Data platform for researchers at U-M. Currently ThunderX supports mapreduce, Spark,… Read More »
Advanced Research Computing – Technology Services (ARC-TS) is seeking pilot users for two new research services. The first, Locker, is group project storage focused on large data sets, and is available at a cost less than half that of current primary storage services. Locker still provides encryption, replication, snapshots, and workstation access. Example use cases for Locker are research… Read More »
Advanced Research Computing – Technology Services (ARC-TS) at U-M has recently joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), an organization that advances the development and use of cloud native applications and services. U-M is the second academic institution to join the foundation, and the only one in the U.S. “Our membership in the CNCF signals our commitment to… Read More »
Advanced Research Computing – Technology Services (ARC-TS) is pleased to announce that the Yottabyte Research Cloud (YBRC) computing platform is now certified to accept data designated as Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI). This includes certification for YBRC and its associated services, enabling secure data analysis on Windows and Linux virtual desktops as well as secure hosting of databases and… Read More »
Advanced Research Computing – Technology Services (ARC-TS) is starting the process of creating a new, campus-wide computing cluster, “Great Lakes,” that will serve the broad needs of researchers across the university. Over time, Great Lakes will replace Flux, the shared research computing cluster that currently serves over 300 research projects and 2,500 active users. The existing Flux cluster… Read More »