News

Humanities-oriented support for cloud computing at Berkeley has significantly expanded with help from the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) at the University of Victoria. Cody Hennesy, the campus E-Learning Librarian, and Brendan Mackie, a PhD student in the History department, attended the "CloudPowering DH Workshop", hosted by Compute Canada during the week of June 6th.

To assess the stability and safety of proposed nuclear reactor designs, UC Berkeley nuclear engineers utilize the campus High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster, Savio, to predictively model the pathways of neutrons as they collide with atoms in the nuclear fuel. Kelly Rowland, a PhD student in Professor Rachel Slaybaugh’s lab, and a domain consultant with Berkeley Research Computing (BRC), develops and tests computational methods for simulating neutron motion.

Course Evaluations is excited to announce this summer we are adding both the Boalt School of Law and the College of Engineering to our list of participating departments. By fall 2016, the Blue Course Evaluations system will reach 65% of all student enrollments on campus across 35 academic units.

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Berkeley Audio Visual and Berkeley Video have had an eventful year shining the spotlight on UC Berkeley. Over the last 12 months, nearly 500 events were supported and more than 600 hours of video content were created for 150 unique campus and off-campus organizations.

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June 26, 2016: This morning the CalCentral and Student Information Systems (SIS) Project(link is external) teams deployed CalCentral version 78, coinciding with SIS Go-Live 5.6.

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The Collabosphere Project/SuiteC was nominated for a Global Learning Impact Award(link is external) in late May 2016 for its work towards developing teaching and learning tools.

For Eduardo Escobar, a PhD student in the Near Eastern Studies department, technology provides both a key theoretical concept and a set of practical tools for his dissertation on cuneiform “recipes” from between the second and first millennium BCE. These “recipes” are documents that share a predictable structure for transmitting procedural knowledge from an expert to a novice.

On April 7th, approximately 40 staff from over 15 departments convened at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) for the second Consulting Summit for individuals tasked with supporting research and pedagogy. The Summit provides an opportunity to meet colleagues from other areas of campus, discuss approaches and best practices, and form working groups that aim to address common needs and challenges.

UC Berkeley officials are sending alert notices to approximately 80,000 current and former faculty, staff, students and vendors following a criminal cyberattack on a system storing their Social Security or bank account numbers.

The campus has no evidence that any unauthorized individual actually accessed, acquired or used any personal information; however, it is informing those potentially impacted so they can be alert to signs of any possible misuse of their information and take advantage of credit protection services the campus is offering free of charge.

A Cyberinfrastructure Engineer funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF)  will soon begin to help researchers adapt and scale research workflows to take advantage of campus cyberinfrastructure including the Berkeley Research Computing (BRC) resources, the Science DMZ and associated high-speed networking, and high-speed data transfer tools. The position will be funded by an ACI Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC-NIE) grant awarded by the NSF in December 2015, and will augment the BRC Program’s staff. CIO Larry Conrad is the Principal Investigator on the grant.

To successfully access website and application information, people with disabilities depend on technologies that adhere to specific design principles and standards that can increase usability for everyone. The Web Accessibility team at the University of California, Berkeley, has tested hundreds of websites and learned many lessons about how to implement and sustain accessibility efforts. Read the full article.

A set of fifteen compute nodes equipped with graphics processing units (GPUs) have been added to UC Berkeley’s high performance computing (HPC) cluster, Savio. Read the full article.

The Berkeley Research Computing Program now offers Savio users who have contributed nodes to the condo cluster a way to run more and/or larger jobs at no additional cost. Read the full article.

On January 31, 2016, the transformation of the "Deco Moderne" former UC Berkeley printing plant into the new home of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (“BAMPFA”) will be complete, and visitors will be able to enter the gallery and view the first exhibit in the new space, Architecture of Life, an "international selection of over 250 works of art, architectural drawings and models, and scientific illustrations made over the past 2,000 years." Read the

As of Nov. 30, 2015 UCPath, the University of California’s priority program to implement a single payroll, benefits, human resources and academic personnel solution for all UC employees is live at the UC Office of the President. UCOP employees will now visit ucpath.universityofcalifornia.edu for self-service pay, benefits & HR transactions.

On November 19th, bConnected, Educational Technology Services, and Research IT co-sponsored a Town Hall, Powering Communication Across Campus. The two-hour One IT event gave Berkeley staff, faculty, and researchers the chance to learn about how various departments are working together to support collaboration across campus.

Research Hub, the collaboration and file-sharing platform run for four years by Information Services & Technology (IST), has been retired. The closure, spurred by budgetary constraints, came as an unwelcome surprise to Research Hub users across campus. Anticipating the disruption that would be caused by the shutdown, IST funded a team of staff to help Research Hub users migrate to new technology and services.

The Berkeley Research Computing (BRC) Program is significantly expanding the capacity of the Savio supercomputing cluster, and is adding new computing models to support additional types of workflows across a broad range of research domains. The BRC condo program has seen rapid adoption, with campus partners doubling the size of Savio in the first 18 months.

Strategy. Strategic thinking. Strategic planning. We hear these terms frequently, but often they sound like business jargon, or things that only Chancellors or Presidents or CFOs need to think about or do. But consider this definition of strategy: “…setting in motion the sequence of events that will shape the future in a way that you like (1).” Who doesn’t want that?

Read this professional development article by Liz Marsh featured at Wisdom Cafe

Two new services -- in cloud computing and research data management, each offering free consulting help for campus researchers -- were spotlighted in a Town Hall on September 24, 2015, hosted by Research IT.