Welcome to the Biomedical Research Computing Facility (BRCF) Users wiki! Formerly known as the Research Computing Task Force (RCTF), the BRCF now has an official organizational home in the Center for Biomedical Research Support (CBRS).
Our mission: Biomedical Research Computing Facility (BRCF) "PODs" (small compute clusters) provide a standard hardware, software and storage architecture, suitable for local, interactive biomedical research computing, that can be efficiently managed.
POD maintenance schedule for April 2024
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After the January 2024 maintenance JupyterHub Python version is now 3.9 on all compute servers. Python 3.9 is also available on the command line by calling it explicitly: i.e., python3.9; the default command line python3 version is still 3.8. Many Python packages were also updated, in both the Python 3.8 and 3.9 command line environments as well as in the JupyterHub Python 3.8 environment. Please contact us at rctf-support@utexas.edu if you experience Python-related issues. See this Wiki page for more information about Python on BRCF pods: About Python and JupyterHub server |
BRCF provides local, centralized storage and compute systems called PODs. A POD consists of one or more compute servers along with a shared storage server. Files on POD storage can be accessed from any server within that POD.
A graphic illustration of the BRCF POD Compute/Storage model is shown below:
Features of this architecture include:
The Biomedical Research Computing Facility (BRCF) is a core facility in UT's Center for Biomedical Research Support (CBRS), under the Office of the Vice President of Research. Our small compute clusters, known as "PODs", provide a standard hardware, software storage architecture, suitable for local research computing, that can be efficiently managed.
The BRCF grew out of the earlier Research Computing Task Force (RCTF) working group of IT-knowledgeable UT staff and students from CSSB, GSAF and CCBB. Today OurTeam consists of staff from Molecular Biosciences, CBRS, and the College of Natural Sciences Office of Information Technology (CNS-OIT).
Broadly, our goals are to supplement TACC's offerings by providing extensive local storage, including backups and archiving, along with easy-access non-batch local compute.
Before the BRCF initiative, labs had their own legacy computational equipment and storage, as well as a hodgepodge of backup solutions (a common solution being "none"). This diversity combined with dwindling systems administration resources led to an untenable situation.
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) provides excellent computation resources for performing large-scale computations in parallel. However its batch system orientation is not well suited for running smaller, one-off computations, for developing scripts and pipelines, or for executing very long-running (> 2 days) computations. While TACC offers a no-cost tape archive facility (ranch), its persistent storage offerings (corral, global work file system) can be cumbersome to use for collaboration.
The BRCF POD architecture has been designed to address these issues and needs.
After the August 15, 2023 maintenance the default R version is R 4.3.1 both for RStudio Server on all compute servers, and on the command line. See About R and R Studio Server for more information. |
In March 2023, the BRCF completed upgrading the Operating System (OS) software on all our POD servers. See this page for important information about how this change may affect you: Winter 22-23 OS Upgrades. |
After the Tuesday June 28, 2022 maintenance, remote SSH access to POD compute servers no longer uses non-standard port 222. Instead, uses standard port 22, so no port (-p) option is required in the ssh command. |
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