Excerpt from the 2015-2016 OIT Annual Report
The Center for Research Computing (CRC) within the Office of Information Technology, in partnership with the Ken Kennedy Institute, manages Rice’s shared research computing, storage, networking, and visualization facilities. The CRC operates five research computing clusters, research storage infrastructure, and the Chevron Visualization Laboratory. The CRC also works closely with faculty to enable access to national computing infrastructure such as the NSF-funded Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) resources.
Rice’s shared research computing infrastructure is important to Rice faculty. The Ken Kennedy Institute estimates that somewhere between 60% and 70% of Rice’s research expenditure is enabled by shared managed computing infrastructure and continues to have a substantial impact on the success of attracting research funding. Shared infrastructure supports the research of over 170 PIs, roughly 35% of Rice’s tenure and tenure-track faculty (up from 160 from a year ago), and 600 users (up from 500 from a year ago). At any given time the clusters are, on average, being actively used by over 200 unique users working for over 60 unique PIs. Of the total capacity, 75% is part of the compute commons and 25% are faculty owned compute condos.
The Chevron Visualization Laboratory is located on the first floor of Dell Butcher Hall and was enabled by a generous donation from Chevron. The lab is the home of the Data Analysis and Visualization Cyberinfrastructure Wall (DAVinCI Wall) funded by a National Science Foundation grant. The lab enables the display, analysis, and interrogation of data and images in two and three dimensions. The CRC’s visualization support extends past the lab itself and works to enable data visualization across multiple platforms such as research labs, offices, and mobile devices.
The CRC operates 2.2 petabytes of storage. In FY17 plans include bringing on additional storage resources under the guidance of the ITC Research Computing Subcommittee.