About us
Research Computing Services (RCS) is a team within University Systems that provides advanced computing infrastructure for researchers. We specialize in helping researchers with their computational needs and collaborating to push the edge of advanced research computing. Our team includes:
- Research computing specialists who provide consultations and host training workshops.
- A dedicated information security specialist focused on the needs of researchers.
- System administrators who maintain research infrastructure in our data centres, including colocated servers.
- A software expert who can help you design custom research software.
We work closely with regional and national organizations to support research projects across all disciplines, including:
- Physical sciences
- Earth and ocean sciences
- Engineering and computer science
- Social sciences
Contact us
Our team of experts is here to support you and your research.
Contact us at arcsupport@uvic.ca for your questions related to research computing at UVic.
Our infrastructure
Our data centres host research computing infrastructure for general purpose use as well as systems for particular projects and research groups. This infrastructure is used by researchers at UVic and institutions across Canada. We design our research computing infrastructure with resilience and reliability in mind:
- Fully redundant power feeds from hydro to server racks. All of our UPS units, power distribution cabinets, and in-rack power distribution units have back-ups.
- We use renewable hydro power generation; almost 1 megawatt is available to our data centre!
- Network speed up to 25Gbps between compute and storage nodes, and up to 100Gbps to partner research institutions across the country.
- All servers are backed up nightly.
We're prepared for major incidents like power or network outages, often without any noticeable effects for end users.
Arbutus cloud
The Arbutus system is the largest research cloud in Canada. It's an OpenStack cloud system that hosts virtual machines and cloud computing workloads. It's one of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada's national platforms and is available for researchers across the country.
- Designed to support researchers with processing, sharing, and storing massive data sets.
- Has over 20 petabytes of storage and 16,008 CPU cores across 484 nodes.
- Can store the equivalent of 400 million four-drawer filing cabinets worth of text.
- Can process calculations thousands of times faster than a desktop computer.
Our partners
Our team works closely with research partners across the university.
The UVic Library offers many services for grant-funded research projects. Their LibGuides site has support guides for research topics including:
The Office of Research Services provides support to researchers looking for:
External partners
We also work extensively with several non-profit organizations and industry partners.
Digital Research Alliance of Canada
The Digital Research Alliance of Canada is a non-profit organization funded by the federal government. Established in 2019, the Alliance formed out of several other groups including Compute Canada and West Grid. The primary goal of the Alliance is to provide advanced research computing tools and services to Canadian researchers. This goal is accomplished through collaboration between all the member schools and organizations.
UVic is a member of the Federation, which manages and operates the advanced research computing infrastructure and provides technical expertise to the Alliance.
CANARIE
CANARIE is a non-profit organization primarily funded by the federal government. Their primary goal is to provide high-speed network infrastructure and resources to researchers and educators across Canada.
Acknowledgements
We appreciate acknowledgement from projects that have received support from Research Computing Services when research is published. This includes support in the form of:
- Access to computing or storage infrastructure
- Software
- Consultation services
If you've published a paper or given a presentation that acknowledges RCS, please let us know! This helps us get funding to support your future research.
Statement of acknowledgement
"This research was enabled in part by support provided by Research Computing Services at the University of Victoria."
If you've used Alliance resources, please include them in the acknowledgement as well. You can find acknowledgement information on the Alliance website.
Grant support language
The following language is recommended for describing UVic's research computing infrastructure and resources:
UVic Research Computing Services (RCS) assists researchers with their advanced research computing needs and complex computational workflows. In addition to managing and maintaining ARC systems including HPC clusters and clouds, research software, and ARC platforms and tools, the RCS unit supports, guides, mentors, and collaborates with researchers to excel at their research and push the boundaries of ARC computing. More specifically, RCS assists researchers with their hardware specifications and solutions architecture, data management plans, grant applications, survey and data collection designs, software development, ARC mentoring, and training and support for local, regional, and national digital research infrastructure. RCS also offers consultation services, with topics including data privacy, security, and sharing requirements.