The Division of Information Technology (DoIT) is responsible for regularly developing and implementing the UMBC Campus Cyber Infrastructure plan for the campus. This plan was developed in consultation with the VP of Research and campus shared governance in 2016 and will be updated in early 2020. As part of that plan, DoIT provides the following services to researchers, both faculty and graduate students, on campus:
- High Performance Computing (HPC) – DoIT, in collaboration with the Vice President of Research & Creative Achievement, provides operational support for the campus HPC core facility. In early 2019, UMBC set up a heterogeneous cluster with equipment acquired in 2013 and 2018. It contains over 170 CPU nodes, a GPU cluster with a node containing 4 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs, and an 8-node Big Data cluster. This is an NSF-funded system supporting parallel programming with a great deal of high-performance storage.
- Research VM Hosting –
- Advanced Networking – DoIT operates the on-campus and off-campus network to support campus. UMBC, through an NSF CC*IIE award to CIO Jack Suess in 2014, UMBC was among the first 70 universities to be connected at 100Gb to the Internet2 backbone. To support advanced networking, UMBC is a member of Internet2, the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX), and the MD Research and Education Network (MDREN).
- Research Storage – DoIT manages more than 5 PiB of enterprise storage used by researchers. DoIT works closely with the deans and VP of Research & Creative Achievement to build and maintain growth of a robust storage architecture to meet the needs of researchers. In addition to HPC storage, researchers can take advantage of Box, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive (read more about these on the Centralized Storage and Backup page).
- Software – DoIT manages and pays for many of the campus software packages used for research. DoIT provides free to faculty the following software – Microsoft Windows, Apple OS, Microsoft Work, Redhat Linux, Matlab, SAS, SPSS, Mathematica, along with several limited-use licenses. All software can be found and downloaded at my.umbc.edu/go/software
- Cloud Computing – UMBC has procured cloud computing contracts through the Internet2 NET+ program with AWS and Google Cloud. Researchers interested in using the cloud for their research should submit a ticket to the Research Computing team to discuss the best options for their data.
- Research Computing & Data Consultation – DoIT has partnered with the AOK Library and ORCA in order to better understand the varieties of research workflows that might make use of campus infrastructure. The DoIT Research Computing team is happy to work with campus community members to better understand this infrastructure and to guide its strategic growth.
- Training & User Support – DoIT has formed a collaboration with the ScaleS center out of COEIT to better align campus community members with the skills and knowledge they need to successfully navigate our infrastructure and services. The DoIT Research Computing team has deployed a variety of
- Shared Infrastructure Governance