RT service highlight: Research Desktop

Research Desktop (RED) provides a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) for researchers unfamiliar with command-line coding who want to use HPC resources. Research Software and Solutions (RSS) Director Robert Henschel says increasing accessibility diversifies the research projects that use IU’s HPC resources beyond the computer sciences.

Use case: Improving how scientists measure air pollution

IU environmental science Ph.D. candidate Colleen Rosales uses RED to power complex air pollution measurements. RED allows her to share her work without her colleagues having to install programs on their own computers or learn UNIX terminal commands. She uses her research as a digital teaching tool.

“The graphical interface of RED helps me easily share and show people how to use IU’s supercomputers, from colleagues to undergraduate students.”

Colleen Rosales
Graduate student in Environmental Science, IU Bloomington

RT service highlight: Karst

A high-throughput computing cluster designed to deliver large amounts of processing capacity over long periods of time, Karst provides batch processing and node-level co-location services, making it especially suited for high-throughput, data-intensive parallel computing jobs.

• Remote access from Karst Desktop
• 228 general-access compute nodes
• 28 condominium nodes
• 16 dedicated data nodes, each with 64 GB RAM and 24 TB local storage
• Each node: IBM NeXtScale nx360 M4 server with two Intel Xeon E5-2650 v2 8-core processors, 32 GB RAM, 250 GB local disc storage

Use case: IU student researcher wins award for poster on advanced computing

Student researcher John Clere (shown far right) documents Indiana history using hundreds of images, processed through Karst, to make 3D-printed models of artifacts from Floyd County. His poster, titled “Floyd County history now in 3D: Supercomputing and photogrammetry increase understanding of artifacts” won “Best Overall Poster” at the Student Poster Expo.