Frequently Asked Questions

Please send email to RCI Info for any specific questions not covered in this FAQ or the RCI website.

We respond to user inquiries as quickly as possible. You will get a response within one business day. For new accounts on TSCC, usually the accounts are ready within 48 business hours.

Yes, to encourage the use of RCI resources, technical expertise is available to researchers to setup new infrastructure. Typically, free consultations are available. Advanced customizations are available through recharge.

Please email the RCI Contact with your project information and we will get in touch with you for an interview.

RCI does not currently provide this service. SDSC Cloud may provide a capable solution for such needs.

Currently we do not offer a HIPAA-compliant data service. The UCSD Human Research Protections Program and Institutional Review Board website offers a lot of information, including a quick training tutorial on HIPAA compliance. The UCSD Health Sciences Compliance Program may also be helpful. They offer online HIPAA training materials as well. The NIH website provides higher level information on sensitive data encryption.

There is no Dropbox-like service available through RCI at the moment. But you can consider following non-RCI services available at UCSD to handle your data sharing, synchronization and version control needs.

Sharing

• SDSC cloud
  • It is available through a web interface, or a client like Cyberduck, which requires manual synchronization. ExpanDrive allows one to mount SDSC cloud as a network drive.
• SDSC project storage allows you to mount the shared storage as a drive on your Mac, but there is no automated version control.

Synchronization

1. GoodSync is software that allows synchronization of files based upon a preset schedule.
2. BitTorrent Sync synchronizes files using a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol, which is well known for efficient large files transfer across multiple devices.

Several additional services are under consideration for RCI. Your input to RCI Contact is welcome on these and other solutions you may prefer.

• Globus Online has a web interface for transferring and backing up files on UCSD premises, but it does not provide automated synchronization.
• EMC Syncplicity is the closest option to Dropbox. It allows users to store data on their own equipment using a desktop synchronization client. It is optimized for the Windows and mobile environments, it works in Mac environment with slightly degraded visual cues.
• Other universities have negotiated Dropbox or Google drive for use by their faculties.

We decommissioned Triton in 2013 and opened our new cluster, the Triton Shared Computing Cluster (TSCC). The only accounts migrated were those with purchased time. However, we can grant you a trial account on TSCC. The trial accounts are 250 core-hours for 90 days. Beyond that, you would need to purchase time at the rate of $0.025 per core-hour, minimum purchase $250 (10,000 core-hours).

You can view a detailed description of the condo cost.

• RCI TSCC supplement to ops fee: $1310/year/node
• RCI colocation supplement to rack costs (which are paid by TSCC) is $4000/year/rack and ~36 nodes/rack

We can provide you a detailed budget estimate spreadsheet to estimate the total cost.

You can visit the Computing section of this site for basic information and cost of the TSCC condo. Please contact RCI Info for further information.

Please visit the TSCC Software page to see the list of supported software. Our administrators will be happy to work with you to extend the software stack as time and costs allow. You can also consider the XSEDE program, which may support additional software not found on TSCC.

We currently have 3 GPU nodes available for general access. Each node has 4 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 GPUs.

Yes, we can grant you trial accounts on the system, consisting of 250 service units (core-hours) good for 90 days. Beyond that, you could purchase time at the rate of $0.03 per service unit (purchases may be made through inter-campus recharge if you are from UC system). There is also an option to participate in our "condo" cluster, using equipment funds from your grant to purchase nodes for the cluster.

For the trial accounts, we need your name, email address, and an ssh public key. Keys can be sent as files or cut/pasted into the body of an email. We can help you install your own software once the accounts are set up. Send your request to RCI Info.

There are 64GB of memory per 16-core node on the standard cluster. This is available to allocated cores at approximately 4GB each. We also have a few 32-core nodes with 512GB (16GB per core), though the CPUs are about 4 years old.

In January 2011, NSF began requiring that proposals include a supplementary document, two pages maximum, labeled "Data Management Plan" (DMP).

Agency-wide guidance from NSF on preparing a data management plan is very general. Applicants are asked to describe the types of data to be collected, standards to be used for data and metadata, policies for access and sharing (including protection of privacy), policies and provisions for reuse, and plans for archiving and preserving access to data.

Some individual directorates and programs within NSF have more specific guidelines. What is considered appropriate data management is left largely to individual disciplines via the peer review process and program management.

The NSF Dissemination and Sharing of Research Results page provides relevant documents, including those specific to Directorates, Divisions, Programs, and other NSF units.

No. A summary of the data management and sharing policies of federal funding agencies can be found on the Federal Funding Agencies: Data Management and Sharing Policies page of the California Digital Library.

• Send email to RCI Info
• RCI Contacts list
• Guidance
• Example DMPs submitted by UCSD PIs