Technology plays an essential role in the university’s research mission and continuous investment is required to remain competitive and attract talent.  

Over the past year OneIT made plans to significantly enhance the Argon High-performance Computing (HPC) and Interactive Data Analytics Service (IDAS) environments. A new tool called iThenticate was introduced to help researchers ensure that publications are properly cited. 

Expanded computational resources

Argon HPC is a cluster system comprised of several hundred compute nodes with several thousand processor cores, which allow researchers at the university the ability to perform very large and complex analysis across a broad range of disciplines. Argon HPC allows researchers to buy and rent hardware. IDAS supports large-scale and collaborative data analytics using interactive tools such as RStudio for R and Jupyter Notebook for Python, R, and Julia. 

Much of the year involved paving the way for enhancements that will roll out in the next six months. Research Services worked to secure contracts for hardware updates, as a significant portion of the Argon HPC environment will reach the end of its service life in 2024. Updates to the HPC cluster and data-analytics environment will also help meet growing demands for strategically important areas like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. 

Within the cluster for this cycle, Research Services purchased 84 total systems to add computational capacity to the cluster available to everyone on campus (an increase of about 60 percent). More graphics accelerator units were also added to the cluster for faculty to use (an increase of about 55 percent) and the total number of GPUs available will be about 150 after the expansion. 

“We were able to make a fairly significant investment,” says Joe Hetrick, executive director of Research Services in Information Technology Services (ITS). “Every researcher on campus will have access to more graphics accelerators in HPC and IDAS.” 

Tools tailored to the job 

Professor and E. F. Lindquist Chair in the Department of Psychological and Quantitative Foundations in the College of Education Jonathan Templin uses both Argon and IDAS when conducting his research. He uses quantitative methods to research methodological issues in psychometrics, or as he puts it, the statistics behind assessments done through vendors such as ACT, College Board, or Pearson.  

Templin determines whether to use Argon or IDAS on a case-by-case basis. He says it is common to categorize them as high-performance versus high-throughput, with high-performance providing a lot of resources for one job and high-throughput allowing many jobs to run simultaneously. 

“Some of my work is simulation-based,” Templin says. “We come up with a new method, a new model, or we evaluate in the existing method, but we have to simulate data providing a controlled experiment, and that’s where the high-throughput idea comes through. One of my projects will require about 420,000 different analyses we need to run – and that’s Argon.” 

Templin likes IDAS in classes, because it is a controlled environment and students know where to access things. IDAS will pull down a GitHub repository automatically, so if he updates something for class, all the code and files are there. This reduces time spent moving and locating files. 

“IDAS has a nice easy web interface to the Argon file system,” Templin says. “Sometimes if I’m off campus, mapping the Argon file system may be a little bit laggy, so I can just be inside the notebooks window and have files on Argon that I can use directly as part of that system so I can modify that, develop, and so forth.” 

Research Services has seen an increase in requests for renting computational resources, possibly due to pilot projects, and is working to meet that need.  

“Rentals have always been on a first come, first serve basis and things were getting pretty thin because people might rent them for a year,” Hetrick says. “We want to increase that because if it’s not available for folks to rent, they really don’t have any place to go.” 

Focusing on user education 

Training to use the resources is also an area of focus. Research Services hired research computational facilitator DooSoo Yoon in December 2023 to develop and present workshops to help faculty and students leverage the HPC environment and also to work alongside other members of Research Services to support HPC and the research mission of the institution. 

“The technology is easy, but people need to know how to use it,” Hetrick says. “We can buy a lot of hardware, but it doesn’t really mean anything if people don’t know how to use it.” 

Yoon is the primary presenter of the introductory HPC workshop, which will be offered quarterly starting in March. Data Science Consultant Giang Rudderham will continue to teach R and Python with IDAS. 

“I’m looking forward to having the workshop and meeting the UI researchers because I was the researcher myself before I started in this role,” Yoon says. “I know how they feel when stepping into these gigantic computing facilities to proceed with their research. I’m happy to help them and to be on this team.” 

Checking research citations  

Another aspect of research is communicating and publishing findings. iThenticate checks user submissions against a database of published scholarly work for inaccuracies in citations and any content that has not been properly paraphrased.  

Senior Instructional Technology Consultant and service owner of iThenticate Jason Spartz says it is essentially a plagiarism-prevention tool geared toward researchers, allowing them to proactively check their work. iThenticate was made available to campus in March. 

Researchers from all UI colleges are using iThenticate. Between March and December 2023, 515 documents were submitted to iThenticate for plagiarism review. 

“The goal was to test it out and see where that interest level sits,” Spartz says. “We’ve had decent interest. We’ve had over 150 active users in iThenticate this past year and we have a capacity for 500.” 

Researchers interested in acquiring an iThenticate account can apply through the Office of Teaching, Learning, and Technology website. Details about the Argon HPC system, IDAS, and training workshops are available on the Research Services website.