Research Computing
Welcome to ITS Research Computing. Our Research Computing team provides and supports high-performance computing, storage and visualization resources both within and external to the University of Louisville. We work to understand your research computing needs and help you determine the resources best suited to your work. Most of our services come at no cost to the researcher, so whether you’re a faculty member, postdoc, student or research lab sta member, we’d love to discuss your research computing needs. Contact us with questions or to set up an appointment.
RESEARCH CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE
The current research computing infrastructure includes: a general-purpose, high-performance distributed-memory cluster (Cardinal Research Cluster or CRC), five high-memory SMP systems, and an informatics cluster. All of the systems are administered by a team of specialized HPC system administrators and supported by a team of research computing consultants with experience in HPC software and database design, development and optimization.
TECHNICAL SUPPORT
ITS Research Computing manages and supports the University’s central High-Performance Computing (HPC) resource, the Cardinal Research Cluster (CRC). Contact our team if you need assistance using your CRC account, including questions about logging in, submitting jobs, available resources, data storage or data transfers.
PROJECT CONSULTING AND DEVELOPMENT
We offer technical assistance and consulting services for computational research. Our broad base of consulting services includes support for UofL researchers ranging from the installation of new software in the CRC environment to collaboration on existing computational research projects or the initiation of new projects. For questions about consulting or to set up an appointment, please contact us.
CRC ACCESS
User accounts for the HPC environment are available through the account application form. Users requesting an account need to be associated with a project/faculty Primary Investigator (PI) in order to run jobs in the HPC environment. PI's initiating projects need to be UofL faculty, but the PI may designate a different point of contact within the UofL community. After an account is requested, it will be verified that the requester is associated with a valid PI, and the requester will be notified about their application status within 2 business days (usually). For non-UofL researchers, the project PI must request a sponsored account. After this account is approved, the PI may request a CRC account for the sponsored researcher.
GRANT WRITING ASSISTANCE
The ITS Research Computing team is available to assist researchers in the development of grants for computational research. General grant-writing support is available at the University of Louisville through the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research. Services offered by ITS research computing include consultation on ideas for computational research, collaboration on grants when appropriate and issuing letters of support for grants available when necessary. Our standard text (general and detailed versions) describing the research cyberinfrastructure at the University of Louisville, suitable for immediate inclusion into proposals and grants, is available in the Knowledge Base.
REDCap (RESEARCH DATA CAPTURE)
Research Data Capture (REDCap) is a secure web application for building and managing online surveys and databases. While REDCap can be used to collect virtually any type of data (including 21 CFR Part 11, FISMA, and HIPAA-compliant environments), it is specifically geared to support online or online data capture for research studies and operations. If you’d like more information on the possibilities available or talk to our team about REDCap resources at UofL, please contact us with details about your project.