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OIT has been working with the School of Medicine (SOM) and the CU Boulder Research Computing team (CURC) to create a shared HPC resource for researchers on the CU Anschutz campus. Our ability to facilitate multidisciplinary discoveries and help advance research productivity is key to our campus strategic initiatives and vision for healthcare and research.

The HPC system, named Alpine, is housed at CU Boulder and available to the CU Anschutz university community at no cost because of the Chancellor’s financial investment to centrally fund current needs and dedicated HPC staff. The commitment provides support to scientists and staff on our campus that need HPC resources to meet research challenges and help advance science. In addition, the CURC team offers an established infrastructure that already supports the Alpine research computing environment as well as existing training opportunities for our employees and students.

This partnership allows our campus to build upon the success of HPC and expand on the technical expertise already available within the CU system. The cost-effective, large-scale storage system, known as the PetaLibrary, already used by some campus researchers, is attached to the Alpine system, thus facilitating access to large data. Alpine performs data and computational tasks, allowing de-identified and non-regulated basic science data to be analyzed. Please note that Alpine HPC resources are not to be used for HIPAA Protected Health Information (PHI) or any highly sensitive data.

With the HPC project, the team can support the campus research mission in the areas of collaborative approaches, leveraging data, and innovative solutions – a commitment OIT is making to continuity in research computing, help with recruiting more scientists to campus, and appeal to grant funding organizations. A soft launch of Alpine’s HPC environment began this spring with small groups of new users to test the onboarding process. The CU Anschutz HPC team and project partners are beginning a broader rollout of the new Alpine environment to CU Anschutz faculty, researchers, students, and staff.

Interested in more information about high performance computing with Alpine? The team can attend your department meeting to discuss more about the system’s capabilities and processes to get started. A Microsoft Teams community site has been created for active HPC users to share best practices, resources, and peer-to-peer support. More information about the new Alpine HPC is available on the OIT HPC webpage, or email questions to the HPC team at hpcsupport@cuanschutz.edu.