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).
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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 working group of IT-knowledgeable UT staff and students from CSSB, GSAF and CCBB. With assistance from the College of Natural Sciences Office of Information Technology (CNS-OIT), BRCF has implemented a standard hardware, software and storage architecture, suitable for local research computing, that can be efficiently and centrally managed.
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 expensive and cumbersome to use for collaboration.
The BRCF POD architecture has been designed to address these issues and needs.
The operating system on all POD compute servers have been upgraded from Ubuntu Linux 14.04 to Ubuntu 18.04. Please see Summer 2019 OS Upgrades for how this change may affect you. |
Per a directive from the UT Information Security Office (ISO), SSH access using passwords from outside the UT campus network has now been blocked. Please see the POD access discussion for more information. |
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