Documentation Content

GRANT INFORMATION

Below is an outline of Research Computing Facilities. Customized letters of support for grants, etc. can be made upon request by emailing research@unc.edu.

Overview

The UNC ITS Research Computing (RC) team operates substantial on-premises data and computing capability delivering high throughput computing, interactive and batch scheduled data intensive analytics and machine learning environments, traditional high-performance computing (HPC), and secure compliant environments. The RC team includes experts in a variety of research domains who assist in using these on-premise capabilities in addition to facilitating access to national (NSF, DOE, NIH, etc.) and commercial cloud resources.

Consultation and Infrastructure

Consultation and infrastructure are provided free of charge to the Carolina research community. In addition to fair-share moderated service to the community, the RC platform provides a framework in which principal investigators may cost effectively invest in dedicated resources embedded within the RC platform that are centrally managed and leverage economies of scale for scenarios where dedicated scale resources are required by a particular PI group.

The free-tier infrastructure includes:

  • 18 petabytes of all flash cluster storage; VAST Data
  • 15 petabytes of nearline storage; Dell EMC Powerscale
  • 2 PB of enterprise storage; NetApp
  • 5 petabytes cluster scratch storage; VAST Data
  • 32k batch scheduled HTC cores; Longleaf cluster, NIST 800-171
  • 17k batch scheduled HPC cores with IB interconnect; Sycamore cluster
  • 24 Nvidia RTX Pro 6000’s; 130 L40/S GPUs; 30 Nvidia A100’s; 64 Nvidia Volta; 32 Nvidia 1080
  • Two 8-way SXM 80GB A100 GPU nodes
  • 5 high memory nodes with 3TB RAM each
  • Open OnDemand Web based interface for GUI and GPU enabled Linux apps for dev/test/repl
  • Commodity cloud storage for cold archival data
  • Secure Research Enclave capabilities supporting externally assessed NIST 800-53 R5 Moderate

The Sycamore cluster was deployed in January 2025 and includes 17,000 AMD EPYC cores, 132 TB Ram, NDR-200 InfiniBand interconnect with 8 of these NDR connections into VAST Data scratch storage system. This system is water cooled.

Software

Software available on RC clusters are managed via the “modules” framework. At present, there are more than 1,300 modules available, including software such as: SLiM, MSMC2, BamTools, SAMtools, VCFtools, GATK, BLAST, MUSCLE, AlphaFold, Schrödinger, Matlab, etc.

Last updated: September 16, 2026