Research Computing

There are multiple UMKC campus and UM System-wide resources available to researchers at UMKC.

UMKC Information Services Resources

Joey

A teaching cluster based on Slurm and the OpenHPC framework intended to explore the basic principles of HPC computing. The system is composed of 1 head node and 3 compute nodes. Each compute node contains 48 Intel Xeon CPU cores and 148GB of RAM. The cluster is accessible via SFTP and SSH. There are several HPC software packages available, including MPICH, OpenMPI, the R statistical computing environment, the Slurm job queuing manager, MySQL database utilities, BLAS, LAPACK, Perl/PHP/Python/C programming environments, SciPy scientific computing library, MatPlotLib, support for HDF4/5 data format, and the ImageMagick raster and vector image processing software. Users can also create custom Anaconda Python environments

Sirius

An Ubuntu Linux virtual server intended to support long-duration compute-bound processes, configured with 8 processors and 64GB of RAM. Supported software includes BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms), the R statistical computing environment, Perl/Ruby/Python/C programming environments, and a hosted JupyterLab server accessible from the UMKC network or VPN.

UMKC School of Computing and Engineering Resources

SSE Machine Learning Cluster 

The SSE Machine Learning (ML) cluster is a Slurm based cluster built on the OpenHPC framework consisting of 1 head node, 1 login node, 7 Teaching nodes and 6 Research nodes. Each Teaching node contains 32 AMD EPYC CPU cores, 128GB of RAM and 8 16GB Nvidia GPUs. Each Research node contains 128 AMD EPYC CPU cores, 512GB or 768GB of RAM, and 8 48GB Nvidia GPUs. The cluster is accessible via the Open OnDemand web interface and SFTP. SSH access is available upon request and approval. There are a number of specialized research software packages available on the cluster, including MATLAB, VMD, and CP2K. Users can add their own research software to their shared cluster storage and create their own custom Anaconda Python environments. More information about the SSE ML cluster can be found at it's public documentation, accessible from the UMKC network or VPN. To request access to the SSE ML cluster please contact the SSE Research Group via email.

UMKC Center for Health Insights (CHI) Resources

HealthFacts and HCUP Insights

These services were moved to the UM NextGenBMI AWS research computing platform. Please visit the NextGenBMI website for more information.

REDCap

A browser-based, metadata-driven software solution and workflow methodology for designing clinical and translational research databases. More information can be found on the REDCap website. The REDCap site access does require logging on with a UMKC account.

UM System Wide Resources

Research Data Ecosystem

Data storage system for users of the MU Hellbender and select research systems. RDE storage is tiered into General and High Performance Storage. General storage is $25/TB/Year and High Performance storage is $95/TB/Year. RDE also offers a tape archive solution for researchers to help meet data retention requirements once a project has concluded. More information about the RDE system can be found at the RSS documentation website.

Researcher-Managed Backup Storage (RMBS)

Data archive system available to all UM system members backed by Google Cloud Storage (GCS) with a locally hosted gateway for standard SSH/SFTP access to files. Costs start at ~$1.25/TB/month for long term archival storage and GCS network ingress/egress fees are waived for connections from a UM system network. Clients are only charged for the data storage costs and will need to provide a MOCODE for billing. All data is encrypted at rest in GCS and in transit between clients, the hosted gateway, and GCS. Clients can use standard command line ssh, sftp, or rsync utilities or graphical programs such as WinSCP, FileZilla, or CyberDuck to transfer data to RMBS.

MU Research Support Services

The MU Research Support Services teams interacts directly with researchers to help meet their IT needs. The RSS team manages several IT systems for both general research support and individual research teams. These systems include the Hellbender HPC cluster and it's associated Research Data Ecosystem storage system. They also provide researchers with assistance in writing and meeting IT related grant requirements. More details on RSS services are available on the MU Research Support Services website.