Medical College of Wisconsin
Medical College of Wisconsin Medical College of Wisconsin
Student Faculty Collaborate
Research Computing Center

Research Computing Center

Welcome

The Research Computing Center (RCC) provides the infrastructure and campus-wide access to resources required for high performance computing computationally intensive biomedical research. This includes shared hardware and research-specific software which is supported by MCW and research grants. RCC services and operations are governed by representatives of the MCW Faculty in partnership with RCC leadership.

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Resources and More

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High Performance Computing Platforms

Manage open source scientific applications on several HPC platforms:

  • A 552 Core Linux MPI cluster
  • A 3 Terabyte RAM 40 Core Large Memory Linux server
  • Four Graphical Processing Unit Servers with Three Nvidia K40 (2880 cores) each
  • Four Graphical Processing Unit Servers with Four Nvidia K80 (4992 cores) each
  • MATLAB Distributed Computing Cluster with 256 workers
  • Three 48-core 384GB SMP Linux Servers

Example software used includes Gromacs, NAMD, VMD, R, Bioconductor, Matlab, Bowtie2, Cufflinks, Hmmr, Tophat, Schrodinger Small Molecule Suite, Samtools, and FreeSurfer. These are a representative sample of programs and not an exhaustive list of what is supported.

High Performance Storage

Provide large short term storage for analyses:

  • Isilon Storage pool over 1 PB with seven I/O nodes
  • Isilon Replication pool with 280TB with three I/O nodes
  • Tape Library with four LTO 6 (6.25 TB) drives for archiving

The Storage pool and the HPC Systems are connected by a dedicated 10Gb LAN for maximum throughput.

Archival Storage

To provide long-term research data storage:

  • 1.2 PB on three redundant storage nodes
  • Snapshot capabilities
  • Dedicated archiving LTO-6 tape drive
Software Licensing and Management
The RCC manages the license and license servers for ChemDraw, DNASTAR Lasergene, EndNote, GraphPad Prism, Ingenuity IPA, LabArchives, Matlab, PyMOL, SAS, SPSS, and X-Win32. Software licenses are offered at a significant discount.
Research Server Management
The RCC will configure, install, manage and operate servers for Research Cores within the Office of Research. The RCC provides and manages dbGaP servers.
Grant Submission Assistance
RCC will assist in evaluation of resources and processes needed to comply with data security requirements and provide boilerplate language to describe existing resources. It can also assist in identifying existing MCW resources that could be used for research efforts and design efficient solutions for research problems when needed.
Electronic Laboratory Notebook
The RCC supports the management of research data including an electronic laboratory solution by LabArchives.
Research Application Training and Seminars
RCC sponsors on campus vendor training seminars for selected research applications.

Contact Us

General Questions

rcc_admin@mcw.edu