News & Events

With more researchers relying on computational models to achieve their research goals the existing working storage of the Advanced Research Computing (ARC) environment and the Medical Advanced Research Computing (MARC) Level 4 data environment were running out of storage space.  An additional petabyte was purchased and integrated into our existing NetApp Fas8200.  ARC now has 1.8PB of working space and MARC has 300TB of working space to allow for uninterrupted growth in the amount of research and the number of researchers using these facilities.

The ARC and MARC environments are comprised of high speed networking and interconnects, computing nodes and storage. To find out more about MARC please visit our MARC webpage. To find out how ARC can benefit your research please send mail to support@hpc.ucalgary.ca.

To meet our researcher’s ever increasing reliance on big data and analytics, the University has invested in an additional four petabytes of storage into the ARC cluster. This NetApp FAS2720 is mounted on the /bulk file system and is to be used for large data sets. In addition to being used as cluster storage, this new file system will also be made available to select scientific instruments to store data. Please send requests to support@hpc.ucalgary.ca for access and provisioning.

We are excited to announce the go-live for two more new Secure Compute services for the UCalgary research community, effective today, June 12. These are available for SCDS share group members to process and analyze Level 4 data:

• Medical Advanced Research Computing (MARC) HPC Cluster.  This will provide a high performance compute / high throughput computational resource.  MARC is a general purpose, multiuser Linux high performance computing cluster made up of multiple compute nodes to run memory intensive and parallel compute jobs. The MARC HPC cluster has CPU, GPU, large RAM and storage resources. Jobs can span more than one compute node if required.
• Data Analysis Tools (DAT). This will be used to request, manage, and decommission a standard secure Windows virtual machine (VM) with several options for specifications. Users can take advantage of standard software from the UCalgary software center, or request temporary admin access to load specialized software.

These services are being offered to complement two other services that were requested by the research community. These are SCDS for data storage and ShareFile for internal and external data sharing. All these services are provided within the UCalgary environment and meet standards and policies for management of L4 data; in particular the Information Security Classification Standard.

Objectives and Benefits

• Support for the Eyes High Strategy and 2018 Research Plan: assist in creating a dynamic research environment and be one of the top five research institutions in Canada.
• Provide these necessary computing services for the entire data lifecycle for research projects
• Compliance with national and industry standards and the University of Calgary policies and procedures.

Here is what it means for you:

• You have an excellent support team.  Comprehensive training has been provided for all groups supporting these secure compute services.
• DAT:  The new service will reduce the time required to request a virtual machine from several weeks to less than an hour. The DAT/VM provisioning process has been automated.
• MARC:  The new service provides a secure and auditable manner in which to request and be granted access to a MARC cluster for executing complex or parallel analyses of Level 4 data. A dedicated team of HPC experts and data scientists will be available to help deploy your research workflow in MARC.

Getting started:

• Please start browsing the new Secure Computing platform website. This website is built to help the research community navigate through all the features of the platform with extensive training material including User Guides for each feature as well as FAQs. Video training will also be available in the near future.
• If you are part of an SCDS group share, you can request a DAT Windows virtual environment (VM) or access to the MARC cluster.