RT Impact: The state
Making research tools easier to access and use
RT staff strive to enable researchers to reach discovery faster with low barriers to their research. From education and outreach to tools like Research Desktop (RED) and Jetstream, RT makes it easier to access vast amounts of storage and research software, as well as perform fast calculations on IU’s supercomputers.
IU’s RED makes supercomputing accessible to a wider pool of researchers and educators
RED provides a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) for researchers and students unfamiliar with command-line coding who want to use HPC resources. From education and outreach to tools like Research Desktop (RED) and Jetstream, RT makes it easier to access vast amounts of storage and research software, as well as perform fast calculations on IU’s supercomputers, to be highly effective in engaging students and researchers who are new to HPC.
“I have used RED to support undergraduate and graduate education here at IU. As an instructor, I need RED because what I teach often involves the use of technology. RED provides a consistent computing environment for my students.” – Devan Donaldson, assistant professor of information science, IU Bloomington
Enabling discovery and accurate predictions
Predicting a river’s future behavior is critical to preparing communities and ecosystems to handle it. Dan Myers used IU supercomputers, Big Red 3 and Carbonate, to run thousands of models, studying watersheds and verifying that his findings were consistent. His work creating accurate hydrologic models will help inform the design of urban stormwater systems, and help fisheries managers understand what changes will be necessary to adapt to rising water temperatures due to climate change.
“IU’s supercomputing resources have allowed us to finish up this study. It took about a year and a half between when we started and when the results were published. But without them, if I were running the models on my desktop computer, I would have hardly made any progress.” – Dan Myers, graduate student in the Department of Geography at Indiana University Bloomington
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PEARC20
Indiana University researchers and leaders showcased a wave of innovative supercomputing resources and techniques at the Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing Conference Series (PEARC20), an annual conference by the Association for Computing Machinery. Plenary speaker David Y. Hancock introduced the XSEDE-funded Jetstream2, one of five innovative HPC systems awarded funding by the National Science Foundation.