BDAIRR

Infrastructure and User Services  

The Center for Information Technology at the University of Groningen is a leading international center in the field of IT. Decades of experience in providing a robust infrastructure to researchers enables us to deliver innovative solutions and a solid base. Our research support has a data centric approach with high-end infrastructure and a multidisciplinary data science support team. Together with researchers we create Virtual Research Environments based on the building blocks listed below. Large (inter)national projects such as LOFAR (astronomy, big data), Lifelines (medical, sensitive data) and the Euclid Science Ground Segment (astronomy, highly distributed processing) rely on our data infrastructures. 

Big Datahandling AI and Robotics for Research (BDAIRR) consists of 

1. Three fully equipped data centers ( 1100 m2) with green power provisioning (1.4MW capacity, with possible expansion to 2MW). A state-of-the-art green (HPC-) data center (CBC) was opened in 2022 to support the growing demand for computing services.  
2. A dedicated database infrastructure, providing cutting-edge performance and reliability. 
3. Excellent access (100 Gbps) from the national academic network (SURF), with high speed light paths for dedicated services. 
4. State of the art, online/near line, large scale data storage facilities including protocols for secure research data.. Application servers use the same network as the high performance  storage to support IO intensive processing. 
5. High-end scalable HPC-clusters including support for scientific programming and AI/datascience. 
6. Innovation Lab (ILSE) for testing and development of AI and HPC-infrastructure. 
7. Founders/co-developers of the EESSI/MultiXscale platform for scientific software. 

Examples/description of the type of research  

Astronomy Research and WISE Technology:

BDAIRR supports many astronomy projects which have complex data. These include Euclid, OmegaCAM, MUSE, METIS, MICADO and dangerous Near Earth Objects. 

WISE technology started with the EU programme "Enhancing Access to Research Infrastructures".  It ensures that the lineage of processed data is preserved in a rich data model. WISE technology underlies the NOVA Long Term Archive and  Euclid System Ground Segment. It has also been applied to such diverse fields as PET brain scans and the analysis of spectral cubes of mineral samples. 

Artificial Intelligence and handwritten scripts:

Monk is an ongoing project allowing access to large and diverse historical archives which are difficult to access by means of traditional 'OCR' approaches. The technique has been applied to many difficult texts e.g. dead sea scrolls (see Q72). Monk is unique, due to its  scale, genericity and use of live machine learning. 

In the HAICu project, AI researchers, heritage professionals and engaged citizens aim for scientific breakthroughs in AI to open up, link and analyse large scale heterogeneous multimodal digital heritage collections. This facilitates user-assisted generation of fact-based narratives. 

Genetics:

MOLGENIS is a modular web application for scientific data. MOLGENIS originated from molecular genetics research but has grown to be used in many areas e.g. biobanking, rare disease research, patient registries and even energy research. MOLGENIS provides researchers with user-friendly and scalable software infrastructures to capture, exchange, and exploit the large amounts of data that is produced by scientific organisations around the world. 

How to access the infrastructure ? 

Access to the facilities is provided through ssh-terminals (roughly 80%), graphical user interfaces (roughly 10% through https), and api's (another 10%), mostly to deploy virtual infrastructure, with in most cases a combination of the three from the end user point-of-view.  Access requests can be made through hpc@rug.nl or w.k.nap@rug.nl.