Featured Stories

ResistanceDB supports applied research projects that use genomic approaches to address challenges and opportunities in Canada’s natural resources and environment sectors. One of the challenges was the need to structure instrument data for transfer to processing systems.

RCS was looking into helping to build metadata management pipeline for automation of standard tasks. We have successfully developed scripts and tests for managing a collection of instruments which ultimately led to development of a new service for HPC users available to every researcher on campus not just the ResistanceDB project.

Transition Region Explorer (TREx) is a CFI-funded project and aims to be the world's foremost auroral imaging facility for remote sensing the near-Earth space environment. The biggest challenge was the data acquisition from instruments all over Canada feeding a processing system at University of Calgary. The project needed flexible and scalable storage for enormous continually growing data set.

Research Computing Services successfully solved TREx's data storage and processing problem by designing the storage system and integrating it with University Virtual Machine (VM) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure. The new infrastructure is 100% online and is processing large volumes of data reliably.

The Brain Injury Research in Children program  (BIRCh) was established to respond directly to the concerns of patients, families, clinicians, and institutional decision makers surrounding Mild Traumatic Brain injury and Concussions in children and youth. One of the biggest obstacles were numerous sources of MRI images from all over Canada that are requiring extensive processing with image analysis tools.

Research Computing Services was able to develop a successful method for using Advanced Research Computing (ARC) cluster that  helped BIRCh setup work directories that can be used to organize data across teams and developed processing automation scripts that support parallelization at the level of subjects.

As a result they have a large MRI analysis project running and forming a foundation for the work of a large number of scientists.

The Centre for Health Genomics and Informatics (CHGI) is a full service core infrastructure facility offering Sanger and Next-Generation DNA sequencing services and bioinformatics support to researchers across the University of Calgary and other research institutions. CHGI has a challenge of highly complex interconnected bioinformatics workflows and processes, as well as unsustainable infrastructure due to shifting space requirements and staffing issues.

Research computing Services (RCS) helped CHGI with the transitioning of ~400 users, over 100 workflows, migrating 2.5 PB storage and 3 clusters along with numerous non-HPC systems into sustainable, supported infrastructure. RCS successfully integrated 3 standalone cluster into Advanced Research Computing (ARC) cluster, designed and acquired 4 PB of bulk storage to accommodate reference datasets and instrument data, and added 1 PB fast storage. Moreover, RCS provided ongoing user training and consultation.

As a consequence of successful transition, CHGI users have access to more HPC and storage resources. They have access to ongoing HPC consulting and training for their computing requirements.