UAB IT Research Computing provides comprehensive support for researchers that use Cheaha, the campus high performance compute cluster. Research computing staff develop and maintain the cluster and provide advanced software and consulting support if needed by researchers. Research Computing staff also maintain proposal support documentation, such as letters of commitment and facilities descriptions, to allow researchers a tighter focus on their projects.
UAB Information Technology has set a new focus on research computing. UAB IT is an organization that has set its sights on a world-class reputation and is quickly making its mark with world-class technology —including the fastest super computers in Alabama and the fastest internet among Alabama universities —and a commitment to investing heavily in high performance computing and research computing with a planned investment of $5 million per year.
Cheaha is currently the faster supercomputer in the state of Alabama with a theoretical throughput of approximately 450 TFlop/s and consists of over 3000 CPU cores and 72 NVIDIA-P100 GPU's. Cheaha is supported by a high-speed parallel filesystem that can store 6 PB of data (raw) interconnected by a high speed infiniband network. UAB researchers use Cheaha for wide variety of research such as genomics, neuro-imaging, machine learning, statistical genetics, cancer detection etc. More information of research being carried out on Cheaha is available on our Featured Research page
Featured Research Applications
The Research Computing Group also helps support the campus MATLAB license with self-service installation documentation and supports using MATLAB on the HPC platform, providing a pathway to expand your computational power and freeing your laptop from serving as a compute platform.
MATLAB Information
- Learn more about MATLAB and how you can use it at UAB
- Learn more about the UAB Mathworks Site licenseand review frequently asked questions about the license
The UAB IT Research Computing group, the CCTS BMI, andHeflin Center for Genomic Sciencehave teamed up to help improve genomic research at UAB. Researchers can work with the scientists and research experts to produce a research pipeline from sequencing, to analysis, to publication. GALAXY -A web front end to run analyses on the cluster fabric. Currently focused on NGS (Next Generation Sequencing; biology) analysis support.
Galaxy
- Galaxy Project Home
- Galaxy Development Wiki
Grant and Publication Resources
The following description may prove useful in summarizing the services available via Cheaha. Any publications that rely on computations performed on Cheaha should include a statement acknowledging the use of UAB Research Computing facilities in your research, see the suggested example below. We also request that you send us a list of publications based on your use of Cheaha resources.
Description of Cheaha for Grants
UAB IT Research Computing maintains high performance compute and storage resources for investigators. The Cheaha compute cluster provides 2800 conventional CPU cores and 80 accelerators interconnected via InfiniBand network and provides 468 TFLOP/s of aggregate theoretical peak performance. A high-performance, 6.6PB raw GPFS storage on DDN SFA12KX hardware is also connected to these compute nodes via the Infiniband fabric. An additional 20TB of traditional SAN storage is also available for home directories.This general access compute fabric is available to all UAB investigators.
Acknowledgment in Publications
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grants Nos. OAC-1541310, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the Alabama Innovation Fund. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
