Last year, Clemson University professors Amy Apon and Dvora Perahia organized a number of town halls and other information gathering sessions to evaluate the state of CCIT research computing support and discover the community’s unmet needs for research computing hardware and humanware. Resulting from your input, CCIT has made the following changes:
- The units named “CITI” (user support) and “ACI” (infrastructure support) have been eliminated.
- The newly formed “Research Computing and Data” (RCD) division in CCIT combines RCD Engagement (formerly CITI) and RCD Infrastructure (formerly ACI) into one group to better serve the research community and to streamline operations. CIO Brian Voss is Interim Associate Vice President for RCD.
- RCD Infrastructure (RCDI) is led by Corey Ferrier and is responsible for installing, operating, and maintaining the research computing hardware infrastructure, including the Palmetto HPC cluster and data storage.
- RCD Engagement (RCDE) is led by Jill Gemmill and is responsible for research computing user support including training, application installation, and one-on-one help with using the research computing facilities. RCDE also includes the Center for Geospatial Technologies.
- RCD is expanding the Palmetto HPC support team and adding new support services for Cloud Computing, Machine Learning, Data Science, and regulated data such as PHI and CUI.
- Clemson has invested $6M for a new data lake storage system, new Palmetto nodes, improved hardware for ArcGIS software, specialized machine learning nodes, and systems for secure use and analysis of regulated research data (such as PHI/HIPAA and Controlled Unclassified Information).
During the virtual town hall on Thursday, December 15, you will hear a more detailed explanation of the new services and hardware and meet the new RCD staff. There will be time for questions and answers, and we look forward to your feedback on how well these changes address your current and future needs.
