jPage: Indiana University Research Computing

Indiana University is enabling new types of research, pedagogy, creative activity, and community impact by building one of the world's foremost research computing environments. This environment combines deep human expertise, robust systems and services, and advances in computer science and informatics to address the needs of researchers and their collaborators on the local, national, and international stage. 

Pervasive Technology Institute

At the heart of IU's cyberinfrastructure are its robust and reliable systems and services provided by the Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI), the Research Technology division of UITS. These are the tools that enable computing research experimentation and implementation, and which amplify the talents and visions of local and national researchers.  

Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) at Indiana University is a world-class organization dedicated to the development and delivery of innovative information technology to advance research, education, industry, and society.  Supported by a $15 million grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc., bas funding from Indiana Unviersity, and a wide variety of grants from federal funding agencies, PTI is built upon the philosophy of “innovation through collaboration.” PTI brings together faculty from the School of Informatics and Computing, Maurer School of Law, IUB College of Arts and Sciences, Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, and University Information Technology Services at Indiana University. In proposing the creation of the Pervasive Technology Institute, IU President Michael A. McRobbie wrote,

"Creating the Pervasive Technology Institute is the logical next step to securing our position of leadership in the information technology field and will serve as a catalyst to our efforts to expand all of our research enterprises within the university and state. It will build on nearly a decade of outstanding applied research work in information technology and on IU's highly advanced IT infrastructure, much of it initially funded by the Lilly Endowment. We are deeply grateful to the Lilly Endowment for this grant -- and for its extraordinary continuing support of so many aspects of the research and education mission at Indiana University."  

PTI activities span the entire spectrum of “research, develop, deliver, and support” in information technology, informatics, and computer science. PTI is a collaborative organization made up of Research Centers and Service and Cyberinfrastructure Centers that are affiliated with PTI and one or more other organizations at IU. These centers include Research Centers and Service and Cyberinfrastructure Centers, as follows:

• PTI-affiliated Research Centers
  • The Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research (CACR) leads the creation of IT security policy, security monitoring tools and secure applications in critical areas of cyberinfrastructure, including personalized health. CACR is affiliated with PTI, the Maurer School of Law, the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, and University Information Technology Services.
  • The Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies (CREST) develops new technologies for high-capability graph computing systems and applications (that is, computing problems based on graph data structures) and exascale computing environments. CREST is affiliated with PTI, the School of Informatics and Computing, the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, and University Information Technology Services.
  • The Digital Science Center (DSC) creates intuitively usable cyberinfrastructure with tremendous capabilities for supporting collaboration and computation. DSC is affiliated with PTI, the School of Informatics and Computing, and the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology.
  • The Data to Insight Center creates new tools to understand and gain insight from the vast quantities of data now produced in digital form now and in the future. D2I is is affiliated with PTI, the School of Informatics and Computing, the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, and University Information Technology Services.
• PTI-affiliated Service and Cyberinfrastructure Centers
  • The Research Technologies Division of UITS develop, deploys, delivers, and supports research cyberinfrastructure for IU scholars and scholars throughout the United States. Research Technologies is affiliated with PTI, the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, and University Information Technology Services.
  • The National Center for Genome Analysis Support (NCGAS) deploys and supports software for analysis of genomes particularly genome assembly from next-generation sequence data. NCGAS is affiliated with PTI, the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, University Information Technology Services, and the IUB Department of Biology (College of Arts and Sciences)

World-class Research Computing Infrastructure

IU's cyberinfrastructure combines world-class supercomputing systems, storage systems, networking, and visualization systems with proven professional training, consultation, and support. 

The Indiana University cyberinfrastructure takes advantage of Indiana University's multicampus structure, and in particular leverages the robust research campuses in Indinapolis and Bloomington, the hardened data centers located in Informatics Communications Technology Complex (ICTC) in Indianapolis and the planned new Data Center in Indianapolis, and the I-Light network.

The IU cyberinfrastructure depends on use of high-speed Force10 switches as a "machine room backplane" providing fully nonblocking interconnections among any of the scholarly cyberinfrastructure systems within each Data Center (Bloomington and Indianapolis), and use of the I-Light high speed optical network to connect the Indianapolis and Bloomington data centers with each other, with the Purdue/West Lafayette campus, and with national and international networks such as Abilene and the TeraGrid network.

The followings are the systems currently running at IU:

• Big Red is one of the most powerful university-owned computers in the US. Part of a comprehensive strategy to build an advanced cyberinfrastructure to support research at Indiana University, Big Red has a theoretical peak performance of more than 40 teraflops, and has achieved more than 21 teraflops on numerical computations.
• Quarry provides a general-purpose Unix computing environment for academic and instructional use. IU's newest supercomputer, Quarry is an IBM HS21 Bladeserver cluster running Red Hat Linux, with TORQUE (also called PBS) and Moab for job management and SoftEnv to simplify application and environment configuration. Quarry is a 26 teraflop system consisting of IBM HS21 blades and dx340 iDataPlex servers.
• Data Capacitor is a high speed/high bandwidth storage system for research computing that serves all IU campuses and NSF TeraGrid Users. At peak performance, the Data Capacitor has a 14.5 gigabyte per second aggregate transfer rate per second.
• Research Database Complex (RDC) is dedicated to research-related databases and data-intensive applications that require a database. Oracle and MySQL databases are supported, and the default database size is 15MB. The RDC also provides an environment for database-driven web applications with a research focus. This system, rdcweb.uits.iu.edu, runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. 

Links:

• Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute

Updates:

• 2012.04.05 in St. Louis - original post