OIT Addresses Growing Research Computing and Data Needs
“We have to be investing in our computing infrastructure and personnel to be able to meet not only today’s needs but also tomorrow’s as well.”
Julie Swann
Interim Assistant Vice Chancellor for Research Computing and Data
Researchers at NC State are always on the hunt for solutions to society’s big problems. With the rise of technology like artificial intelligence (AI), finding those solutions calls for more. More compute power, more data storage, more support.
The Office of Information Technology (OIT) is answering that call by establishing a new Research Computing and Data (RCD) unit.
In February, Dr. Julie Swann joined OIT as the interim assistant vice chancellor for RCD. During her 12-month term, Swann is helping lead efforts to develop the new unit. The unit will focus on improving research computing and storage to support the university’s research, education and community impact efforts.
“NC State is joining universities across the country who have realized it is important to explicitly call out how we are meeting the needs of researchers today and tomorrow for scientific computing,” said Swann. “I am honored to work with OIT and other groups around campus such as the Office of Research and Innovation and the Library’s Research Facilitation Service as we develop a strategic plan for meeting the scientific computing needs for the university and the state.”
Swann and Eric Sills, assistant vice chancellor for OIT Shared Services, have been combing through data to assess growing capacity requirements, opportunities for service improvement and to build a foundation for financial sustainability across services, including High-Performance Computing (HPC), Research Storage and the Virtual Computing Lab.
The university’s need for computing capacity over the next five years is estimated at 10 times the current amount — 5% to 10% of which could potentially be served by the commercial cloud. AI-related research alone has increased processing and energy usage by as much as five times.
“Research at NC State has grown significantly over the last decade, and more and more researchers are using scientific computing to enable new discoveries, contribute to new knowledge, build skills in the future workforce, and impact industry across the state and beyond,” said Swann. “We have to be investing in our computing infrastructure and personnel to be able to meet not only today’s needs but also tomorrow’s as well.”
In 2024, OIT’s HPC service had more than 1,000 users. Those users were awarded a total of $220 million in research funding during fiscal year 2024. To better support their research, OIT is making plans to understand and improve the research user experience, modernize the offerings of the HPC center and provide more user training in the coming year.
“I am proud of the work by our OIT team, including the recent rollout of Open OnDemand with R studio and a partnership with the College of Engineering to deploy Jupyter Notebook in a large class this coming fall. We look forward to continuing to meet the needs of scientific computing at NC State in partnership with others around campus,” said Sills.
Last fall, OIT and the NC State University Libraries collaborated to launch a Research Computing website and implement changes to Research Storage as part of the strategic partnership for the Research Facilitation Service. This initiative followed a recommendation from the Strategic Storage Task Force to improve the usability of Research Storage. Since 2020, the service has had more than 3,100 users.
The option to purchase Research Storage with federal grants was also approved this year, giving researchers with large amounts of data more flexibility to manage that data.
All of these changes — from the new RCD unit to service improvements — aim to drive research computing into the future.
“It is critical that we consider the RCD ecosystem at NC State, making sure that we have the plumbing and the personnel to support researchers while being good stewards of resources,” said Swann.
