New Software Licensing Agreements

杏吧原创 has acquired new university-wide licenses for the IBM聽SPSS聽software and NVivo Plus. Both are now available to all faculty, staff and students, free of charge.

• The IBM SPSS聽software is available for download at聽 (My杏吧原创One login required). Please ensure that you have enough disk space on your device/computer to install this software, as it is quite large, (up to 2GB).聽聽 For more information on disk space requirements, visit聽.
• The NVivo Plus software is available for download at (My杏吧原创One login required).

Qualtrics Research Core software has been added to this initiative.聽 It will also be free of charge for all faculty, staff, and students.

These licenses are in addition to the software packages already available free of charge for faculty, staff, and students (MATLAB, Trend Micro, MS-Office 365, STATA, and more). Visit our Site-Licensed Software webpage for the full list of software packages available.

Increased secure data storage capacity

ITS and OVPRI will be increasing the current secure data storage capacity for researchers from 60 TB to over 400 TB.聽 This storage is backed-up, replicated and stored in 杏吧原创鈥檚 secure data centers.

Along with this increased capacity, researchers will have the capability to share their data with delegated users.

Research Computing Services

Research Computing Services (RCS)聽personnel support and assist researchers in using Advanced Research Computing (ARC) and High-Performance resources available on- and off-campus. This support includes tutorials, training, workshops as well as assistance with porting and optimizing existing code.

If you require research-related IT support, please contact Research Computing Services. All other IT service requests can go through the ITS Service Desk.

They were working with 350GB of input data and predicted that processing it was going to take 70 days.聽 In addition, the existing multi-step workflow required a lot of user intervention between steps (manually editing, copying, moving files and folders), which they were hoping to automate.

After reviewing the researchers鈥� code, the rewrote large sections to improve efficiency of the file reading and writing. This reduced runtime from 2.5 days to 1 hour for the first two steps.聽 They were able to split the code up into several parts and have it run simultaneously in parallel.聽 This is where they noticed most of the speed improvements.

Instead of manual user intervention, they automated most the tasks between the steps of the process using scripts. This allowed the researchers to run most of the process automatically.

The expected runtime of 70 days was dropped to a real runtime of 2 days for an overall performance improvement of 35x using one of the Research Computing Cloud nodes.

鈥淚 am really impressed and happy with the performance results and that weeks of work dropped to days鈥�, said Wallace.

work with faculty members to understand their research computing needs and provide the support or computing resources they require.

In support of the event which took place here at 杏吧原创 on March 29, and the first anniversary of the , this month鈥檚 theme is a 鈥榖ig鈥� one.

Capturing Big Data

• has been created in the past two years than in the entire previous history of the human race.
• Google processes over about . 聽This is over聽3.5 billion searches per day and聽1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.
• have been sent this year, as of this second. 聽 146 of those, as of this second.
• This聽February ITS backed up 482 TB of data. Last February it was 270 TB of data. That鈥檚 a 78% increase in just one year.

Analyzing聽Big Data

• use data to inform Ottawa citizens of key local issues and trends – from basic needs and standard of living to economy and employment to health and wellness.
• Over the next 5 years in North American there will be .
• The Computing Support Unit in the School of Computer Science聽recently聽to support big data learning and research.
• Each month ITS managers meet for ‘Ops Review’聽where they review and discuss campus IT data and trends on everything from wireless, to campus card door swipes to website traffic.

Collaborating Around聽Big Data

• took place on March 29th in the River Building. This is an annual聽conference that celebrates the聽latest developments聽in data science and聽analytics research within聽the 杏吧原创 community and in Canada.
• On聽April 19 a group of over聽40 杏吧原创 researchers gathered in Dunton Tower for a聽day-long聽聽hosted by the Institute for Data Science.
• 53 faculty members are participating in the new collaborative聽data program in the and there are more than 130 researchers at 杏吧原创 are working on projects involving big data
• CCS’s Research Computing Services brings together faculty members in need of similar advanced computing resources.

Supporting Researchers on Campus

This month I sat down with Sylvain Pitre, Manager of Research Computing here in ITS to talk about what him and his team, Andrew and Blake, offer to researchers and the exciting new Research Computing Cluster they are working on.

“We聽help faculty and students who are working on projects with advanced research computing needs. 聽 These projects generally involve big data, large聽computational power or modelling that cannot be handled by standard computing infrastructure.

We work with these faculty members to understand their research computing needs and provide the support or computing resources they require.”

5 Things We Thought You Should Know

1. Congratulations:聽We have three聽people celebrating service anniversaries in May. 聽Congratulations to Pierre Morissette (15 years), Kelly Callan (10 years), and Blake Henderson (1 year).
2. Campus Card Opens Doors and So Much More:聽In March, the Campus Card was used to open doors 864,654 times.聽It was used nearly 300,000 times as a debit card to pay for meals, laundry, printing, vending, and books.聽.
3. Direct-Inward-Dial phone numbers: This month personal DID numbers (example 613-520-4567) to 杏吧原创鈥檚 phone number (613-520-2600 ext. 4567).聽 This change was聽done in order to be consistent in representing 杏吧原创 to the outside community.
4. Latest CCMS Upgrade:聽 Web Services recently upgraded the latest template to . 聽The upgrade includes a new responsive newsletter theme.
5. This Month’s IT Security Tip:聽Banks use comprehensive safeguards to protect the integrity and security of your information and financial transactions. If you choose to bank online you need to do the same.聽 .

Like what you see?聽聽

If you have an idea on how we can improve,聽.

What is it that your team does?

The three of us, Andrew, Blake and I, help faculty and students who are working on projects with advanced research computing needs. 聽 These projects generally involve big data, large聽computational power or modelling that cannot be handled by standard computing infrastructure.

We work with these faculty members to understand their research computing needs and provide the support or computing resources they require.

There are so many new opportunities in big data, particularly for the non-technical departments. At 聽researchers聽from Public Policy and Administration, History, Journalism and Health Sciences spoke to developments, needs and opportunities for Big Data in their departments.

Our services are聽available to any researcher, in any department, who is in need of high computing resources.

What kind of support do you provide?

We offer a number of different support services depending on the individuals needs.

Code

We鈥檝e assisted with the porting, optimization and running of code and applications.

For example, a researcher from the Economics department is using big data to conduct time series analysis. We helped him by looking at the code he was running and tweaked it to run faster.聽 This helped him to focus more on his research and less on the necessary, but often time intensive, computing processes behind analyzing the research.

Another researcher in Biology is looking at genetics of adaptations.聽 He and his student were working with some Open Source code and needed help writing code around it in order to reduce run time.聽 What would have taken six months on a laptop now takes three days using a cluster.聽 Because they need to re-run the code on a regular basis, they can now get the results they need to do their analysis faster.

Grant Proposals

We鈥檝e helped faculty with grant proposals by contributing sections that describe the interplay between their research and advanced research computing聽resources. Granting agencies, like , want to know what resources the university provides and they will then often match it.聽 We help researchers with the details in describing the resources and big data tools that 杏吧原创 provides.

Workshops

In addition, we host and offer a number of workshops on working with big data. We recently hosted . This workshop focused on business analytics to discover insights to: recruitment, enrolment, financial aid, institutional research, student experience, student retention, res life, diversity, facilities, campus safety, and more

Classroom Support

We鈥檙e also providing the DATA-5000 class (in the ) support with access to 杏吧原创鈥檚 Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) and IBM Cognos Business Intelligence software.

This is an interesting program in that it brings together students from science, engineering, arts, social science, public affairs and Sprott.聽 They sign up for a masters degree in one of these departments and then they add a specialization in data science.聽聽 This year the program had 40 students (double than last year) 鈥� 20 from the technical programs, 20 from the non-technical.

What kind of computing resources do you offer to researchers?

Right now we offer access to open and commercial software through the VCL. 聽Software packages available include IBM Cognos Business Intelligence, IBM SPSS Statistics, MathWorks鈥� Matlab, Stata/SE 13, MPICH and Hadoop.

These services are available at no cost to researchers in all faculties at 杏吧原创.

Additional Computing Resources

There are currently a number of specialized computing resources on campus – , Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Computing Cluster, 聽, 聽and .

We offer computing resources for researchers who do not require or are not eligible to use these specialized services.

For researchers working with big data requiring national level support, is a great resource.聽 To be able to use these resources, researchers much submit a proposal (with which we鈥檙e happy to help), but the reality is that researchers are getting on average 64% of their requested resources.聽 This leaves some researchers who are in the middle 鈥� needing more than a laptop but not as much as Compute Canada offers 鈥� to fend for themselves.

Our goal is not to discourage researchers from using Compute Canada, but to offer something in between.聽 Which is why we鈥檙e creating a Research Computing Cluster.

Tell me more about the Research Computing Cluster.

We鈥檙e working on opening a new research computing cluster here in ITS in late spring 2016. 聽It鈥檚 funded by the Faculty of Science, Faculty of Engineering and Design and ITS and the goal is to support researchers from across campus.

There are so many new opportunities in big data for the non-technical departments, for example, mining social media data in Journalism.聽 This computing cluster will be available to any researcher who is in need of high computing resources.

It will be an OpenStack-based cloud solution with 160 IBM Power8 compute cores, 192 Intel, Xeon compute cores for a total of 1.8TB storage (128GB per node) and 60 TB all-flash storage (SSD).聽 A modern laptop might have 4 cores.聽 There are 352 total in the cluster.

What do you see in the future for research computing?

We plan to continue to grow our client base and offer services to researchers who would are looking for compute and storage resources on campus. We want to be the first point of contact for any researcher on campus looking for these services and find them what they need, on or off-campus.

Working close with researchers and discussing their requirements helps us determine services that are not currently within our scope but that could be opportunities in the future.

For more information about the services that Sylvain and his team provide, visit the .