West Virginia University provides a variety of services and software that can assist with computational intensive or digital humanities research. The WVU High Performance Computing systems can be utilized to solve large problems in physical, biological and social sciences, engineering, humanities or business using higher computing power than can be achieved from a desktop computer or workstation.
The WVU High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities support computationally intensive research that require high computational capabilities and low-latency. HPC resources assist research teams at WVU to greatly reduce their computational analysis times. There are FREE community nodes available for researchers who are interested in seeing if HPC can improve their computational analysis times. Researcher can also purchase individual nodes that can be used exclusively when needed or shared by the community when not in use by their research team.
HPC users have access to more than 400TB FREE storage and can also purchase group storage on the cluster that will allow data to be easily shared between researchers. ITS also offers storage in the centrally managed and secure Research Data Depot where storage can be purchased at a low rate for 5 years.
Contact the Research Computing group of Information Technology Services (ITS) for more information about High Performance Computing or the Research Data Depot. Nathan Gregg leads the Research Computing team and is an XSEDE Campus Champion who assists researchers with their computing-intensive and data-intensive research including digital humanities. Dr. Guillermo Franco is a Research Computing team member that has a strong background in the scientific programming languages of C, FORTRAN, and Python. He works directly with researchers to enable them to utilize HPC resources in the most appropriate manner.
HPC training resources are available for new users.
Data Analysis & Visualization
Faculty and staff can purchase MATLAB software for data analysis and visualization. ITS also offers other free and discounted software that aid in advanced scientific computing. To see the complete list, go to slic.wvu.edu.
Affiliated HPC Partners
WVU partners with several regional and national organizations that support big data computing.
- The Extreme Science and Engineering Development Environment (XSEDE) is a single virtual system that scientists can use to interactively share computing resources, data and expertise. XSEDE is supported by the National Science Foundation.
- Located at Georgia Tech University, the South Big Data Regional Innovation HUB frequently offers webinars and workshops and has a Hackpad working group wiki. Supported by the National Science Foundation, the regional Big Data HUBs endeavor to foster innovation through collaboration, diversity, education, and workforce development.
- The Pittsburgh Super Computing Center is a joint endeavor between Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Research Computing and PSC collaborate to provide state of the art HPC and data analytics to researchers at WVU. PSC will host and operate the new HPC Thorny Flat cluster as well as provide ongoing technical support for it.
- WVU is a member of the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation, a non-profit dedicated to advocating the use of the most advanced computing technology to accelerate scientific discovery for national competitiveness, global security, and economic success as well as develop a diverse and well-prepared 21st century workforce.