Posted: 16 November 2006
Research potential grows with new IT Data Centre
The exponential growth in the demand for Information Technology is a direct result of its usefulness to users. Today, the field of research derives great benefits from increasing levels of Information Technology support in various forms including: improved data gathering, data storage, data security, data manipulation and more particularly data display.
Mary Crowe (left), Chief Technology & Information Officer, UCD; Prof
Dave Fegan (centre), UCD School of Physics and Prof Ciaran Regan
(right), Vice-Principal for Research & Innovation at UCD College of
Life Sciences, discuss the new Research IT Data Centre at the official
opening on 15 Nov 2006
To channel the benefits that IT support can offer the research community, UCD has installed a new type of IT environment at the university. This new facility, the Research IT Data Centre is a high density computer facility with the capacity to host high performance computers which are required by computationally intensive research projects. It was officially opened by UCD President, Dr Hugh Brady on 15 Nov 2006.
“In a 160 square metre facility, we can host dedicated high-end research computing, together with large storage and backup capacity,” said Mary Crowe, Chief Information and Technology Officer at UCD. “The Research IT Data Centre offers hosting for high performance computers and massive data storage capacity for large-scale research projects. And a dedicated expert support team are on hand to provide specialist high-end technical assistance to the research community who wish to use the facility.”
The Research IT Data Centre is one of the most technological advanced hosting and data storage systems available today. It was introduced at a capital cost of some €2million. It provides researchers with a cost effective structure for working on data intensive projects and it offers hosting and storage capacity that is both secure and extremely reliable. Funding for the facility was provided by UCD, the HEA and SFI.
Prof David Fegan, UCD School of Physics, explains the technical
capabilities of the new Research IT Data Centre at the official opening
on 15 Nov 2006
With this new facility, UCD will be able to lead and support computationally intensive research projects at national and international level. One example of this type of project is ‘CAVE’ - a brand new computer-aided virtual environment (CAVE) that provides a 360 degree collaborative space where researchers can visualise data from different viewpoints.
Established at the UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics, CAVE, with the support of UCD IT Services, will be increasingly available to researchers across the university. The Research IT Data Centre provides the processing and storage capacity to aid the CAVE project in complex analysis tasks.
The CAVE, or visualisation room, is a series of rank mounted computers, each one the equivalent of two desktop machines and equipped with the most powerful computer video cards available, and IBM’s Deep Computing Visualisation software. Within the room, researchers can work, separately or in collaboration, using a Diamond Touch controlled desktop panel. Their results are projected as a single, continuous surface wrapped around the entire room.
The CAVE is currently being used to combine information visualisation, data visualisation and software visualisation for an automotive software engineering as part of an SFI funded Lero CSET project. “The table surface offers astounding potential to automotive designers and software engineers for exploring how design changes could impact on the automobile software system in next generation cars,” explained Dr Aaron Quigley from the UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics who is leading the automotive visualization project.
According to Dr Quigley, CAVE allows researchers with different inputs to work together using a centre panel and to witness the results of their collaboration take shape, both on the panel and on the surrounding walls. “It allows team co-ordination when the information space is very complex, voluminous and multidimensional.”
CAVE has astounding levels of potential applications for researchers who would benefit from visually interpreting their data including researchers in the fields of engineering, urban planning, medicine and archaeology.
With the new Research IT Data Centre at UCD and an expert technology support team in place to support its use, Dr Hamish Carr a visualisation researcher in the UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics is confident that CAVE will be available as a shared resource across the university.
Research groups can approach the research IT expert support group to discuss their potential needs and in turn liaise with the UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics about using CAVE as a shared resource. “This will mean that CAVE will potentially be used by research groups across the university rather than it remaining locked away for use by only specific projects,” said Dr Carr.