Help
Is your job running slowly? Crashing your laptop because R wants all the RAM? Ready to move up to a cluster?
If you have a problem like this, we'd be happy to meet with you. We don't charge for our time - we're here to help you get your research done.
Contact researchit@iastate.edu for a consultation, or peruse the list below for self-help.
Maybe you need help writing an information security plan, or including servers or storage in a grant proposal.
Contact researchit@iastate.edu for a consultation, or peruse the list below for self-help.
Figuring out where to put your research data isn't always simple. You need to think about data classification level, retention requirements, speed, ease of use, etc.
Below is the list of available storage options that we support.
Does your desktop sound like a passenger jet about to take off? It's probably time to move up to using one of our computational servers.
ResearchIT manages the Pronto cluster and Nova cluster . Both are available through SSH or through your web browser using Open OnDemand, and support both long-running jobs and interactive sessions.
Pronto has a mix of server types for both single and multi-core jobs. It has several GPU servers with NVIDIA 1080Ti, V100, and A100 cards for molecular dynamics, deep learning, etc. Pronto also has a many-core cluster built on Intel Knights Landing architecture that's great for multi-threaded work like Monte-Carlo simulations.
We have thousands of pieces of research software available through the software modules on our servers, and will be happy to add others for you. Don't struggle spending hours or days trying to figure out how to get some esoteric piece of software working - someone else on campus undoubtedly needs the same thing, and we'll do it once so it can be used by everyone.
Try this on any of our servers to search for the software you need (we're searching for blast in the example below):
$ module spider blast
Using our VM or container infrastructure, we are able to host internal or publicly available web applications for your research. We have experience hosting Shiny, PHP, Python, Javascript frameworks, and others.This process involves several steps, including a code review, obtaining DNS, and potentially an information security review (depending on the data classification level), etc. so we encourage you to contact us as early as possible to request hosting (preferably before you're written any code).
One of our primary concerns is maintainability - who will maintain this code in the long-term after a student has graduated, and has the code been left in a state that makes this possible. To that end, we always encourage the use of a well known web framework to build on, such as Django, Drupal, Wordpress or ReactJS. We will also ask for you code to be in a git repo that we (and future maintainers) can access.
Please contact us at researchit@iastate.edu to talk about your web application hosting needs.
We have robust virtualization infrastructure which can host managed VMs, and containers using OKD - letting you focus on your application, not on being a server admin. We can also help with things like application design, code reviews, information security plans, internal git repos, etc.