Researchers within the Astronomy department at IU have any number of computer resources available to them to facilitate their research. Astronomy is grateful to be supported by a number of IT units within the University and to have access to high-capacity computers, peta-byte storage facilities, lightning-fast networks and first class IT support.
Each researcher receives personalized support for their computer needs from the Astronomy department and access to high end workstations that allow them to maximize their research while giving them any number of methods to prepare lectures, seminars, and classes.
Faculty researchers are not the only ones receiving high end IT resources. Graduates and Undergraduates of Astronomy also have access to high end desktops while being supported by experienced and dedicated IT staff. From classrooms dedicated to having workstations with direct access to the central systems housing IU supercomputers, to Astronomy’s Delaney Undergraduate Research Laboratory (DUAL) where students and their research advisors may work together using the research stations designed specifically to support the intense calculations needed to delve into the secrets of the universe.
Many times, researchers benefit from looking at processes used in different fields of study. From weather analysis that processes terabytes of historical weather data along with geological data points to the latest in DNA research or even deep dives into trends in social media, scientists from all walks of life use the resources provided by the College of Arts and Sciences. Run by the expert team within the College + IT division, researchers have access to IT knowledge, diverse equipment and high-capacity printers including 3d printers.
College Information Technology (COLL+IT) consists of fifty-four staff members supporting more than 13,000 devices/network appliances.
We support 1400+ faculty, 550+ staff, and 2500+ graduate students in 110 units and three schools. COLL+IT proactively delivers sustainable and innovative solutions for our teaching and research mission at Indiana University on the Bloomington campus within the College of Arts and Sciences.
Brian Crouch Director College IT Research Infrastruture
With such numbers expressed, sharing the ‘expertise’ in Coll+IT is essential with the heavy load that fifty-four IT Pros do daily.
IU prides itself in being a leader in IT. Winning numerous awards for innovation, support and resources, IU provides some of the fastest super computers in the world with access available to all researchers at IU. From decoding genomes to analyzing the contents of thousands of images and videos, artificial intelligence (AI) is redefining research.
Highlights always tend to focus on the supercomputers and IU is no exception. One of the most widely used systems is known as Carbonate, a large-memory computer cluster configured to support high performance, data-intensive computing for IU students, faculty, and staff.
"Starting in June 2019 with a 12-node expansion of the Carbonate supercomputing cluster, the DL resource has delivered 759,688 core hours, 92,783 GPU hours for over 130 projects. With its uniquely capable V100 GPUs, this resource gives IU’s researchers the ability to get ahead of the curve with their research using AI techniques, we wanted to capitalize on that interest and give people who were very keen on putting in NSF or NIH proposals that involved deep learning a platform to conduct that research on."
Scott Michael, Manager of Research Applications and Deep Learning
Not to be outdone, Big Red 200 is an HPE Cray EX supercomputer designed to support scientific and medical research, and advanced research in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics. Big Red 200 features 640 compute nodes, each equipped with 256 GB of memory and two 64-core, 2.25 GHz, 225-watt AMD EPYC 7742 processors. Big Red 200 also includes 64 GPU-accelerated nodes, each with 256 GB of memory, a single 64-core, 2.0 GHz, 225-watt AMD EPYC 7713 processor, and four NVIDIA A100 GPUs. Big Red 200 has a theoretical peak performance (Rpeak) nearly 7 petaFLOPS.
From an IT News & Events article:
“Big Red 200 is giant leap forward in supercomputing capacity to support IU researchers and students,” said Brad Wheeler, IU vice president for IT and chief information officer. “As one of Cray's newest and most sophisticated systems, it will support large-scale research in medicine, climate modeling, physics, and hundreds of academic disciplines. The combination of the AMD Rome CPUs and the next-generation NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs are well-matched to the needs of IU researchers for simulation, AI, and many forms of research.”
From computer simulations exploring the dynamical evolution of multiple stellar populations in globular star clusters to studying the impact of COVID-19 on Indiana cancer patients, access to IU's super computing infrastructure allows researchers to dive deeper into the mysterious of our universe.
The College of Arts