Maurice Manning has recently joined Berkeley's Research IT team as a cyberinfrastructure engineer (CIE), supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, and has already begun to make an impact supporting multiple research teams on campus.
Initial Engagements
We are very happy to publicly thank Jamie Wittenberg, our Research Data Management Program Director, whose last day at UC Berkeley is December 16, 2016.
On November 10, 2016, Research IT staff from across the University of California system met at UC Irvine to discuss trends in research computing and opportunities for collaboration. The one-day session was facilitated by David Greenbaum (UC Berkeley) and Christine Kirkpatrick (UC San Diego). Patrick Schmitz, Chris Hoffman, and Maurice Manning also represented Berkeley.
For researchers running computation on the Savio high-performance compute cluster, data transfer can be a challenge. A new IPython notebook simplifies data transfer from the free Box collaboration platform to a Savio user’s scratch folder, and provides a template for users to develop their own algorithms that analyze data stored in Box.
A childhood filled with Lego blocks, nature documentaries, science fiction novels, and some amazing science teachers led Evan Lyall to know that he wanted to study Bioengineering in college, but left him unsure of the direction he should go with that training.
October 20th marked the third semiannual Consulting Summit at BIDS, which brought together individuals from over twenty organizations that provide some variety of “consulting” around research and/or teaching. 40% of the participants indicated that it was their first Consulting Summit.
Berkeley Research Computing (BRC) is launching a new Condo Storage service for Savio condo partners who need very large, persistent storage capability at a reasonable price.
“I have always believed in following the science,” says Stephen Floor, a postdoctoral researcher in the Doudna Lab, led by UC Berkeley Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Jennifer Doudna. Floor’s self-described “circuitous” academic journey has taken him from computer science, to physics, and now, to molecular biology.
Faculty contributions drove this year’s increase in computational capacity on Savio, the Berkeley Research Computing (BRC) Program’s shared High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster.
Berkeley Research Computing (BRC) offered two training sessions on how to use Savio, the campus’s high-performance computing (HPC) cluster, in late summer and early fall 2016. Both the introductory session on August 2nd, and the intermediate session on September 27th, drew sizeable and enthusiastic audiences to the Academic Innovation Studio in Dwinelle Hall.
CollectionSpace, the collections management software used by numerous campus museums and supported by Research IT, has been extended over the years by a number of additional web applications (webapps) which provide functionality not included in the core system. These webapps, like the regular CollectionSpace user interface (UI), run in a browser window and are accessible to anyone who has a computer with an internet connection and a suitable browser.
Ray Lee of UC Berkeley’s Research IT department is the lead for the CollectionSpace UI rewrite project, code-named “Drydock.” The following piece describes the state of the project after completing the first of four milestones. This work is funded by a recent grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to LYRASIS, CollectionSpace’s institutional home.
October 24th - 30th is International Open Access Week, a global effort to highlight the connections that Open Access makes possible.
The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology (PAHMA) recently found itself with over half a million digital catalog card images that are in active use, but needed to be duplicated in order to preserve them in a redundant, reliable archive. Copying a few hundred, or even a few thousand files is a relatively straightforward task.
The next Consulting Summit-- a partnership between the D-Lab, Educational Technology Services (ETS), the Library, and Research IT-- will be held on October 20th from 10 - 3 at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), in 190 Doe Library.
The Academic Innovation Studio (AIS) celebrated its grand opening on September 21, 2016 by welcoming faculty and staff into the new space for food and festivities.
Collection management staff of digital collections across all ten University of California campuses can now use self-service tools to submit digital content as well as associated metadata for publication into Calisphere.
Ron Cohen, Professor of Chemistry and Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Berkeley, and graduate students Alexis Shusterman, Josh Laughner, and visiting Harvard graduate student Alex Turner, are “trying to create a model of the world that matches the observations of the world.” That is, Cohen’s team is using sensor technology to measure the concentrations of atmospheric gases at both local and global scales, a
A geospatial class at the Digital Humanities at Berkeley Summer Institute (DHBSI) served as a high-visibility testing ground for the ÆoD virtual workstations provided by Berkeley Research Computing (BRC). The widely-used ArcGIS software for geospatial analysis only runs on Windows, leaving students with Macs in a difficult position.