University of Wisconsin–Madison

Research Computing

Research computing at UW-Madison is heavily decentralized, with many services provided by departments and research centers for their affiliates. The following groups provide research computing services that are available to any researcher at UW-Madison.

If you are an L&S researcher seeking research computing resources, SSCC’s facilitators will be happy to meet with you to discuss your needs and what campus resources will be best able to meet them. Be sure to also speak with your local IT staff.

Social Science Computing Core (SSCC)

SSCC is a suite of research computing services provided by College of Letters & Science Information Technology Services (L&S ITS). It is designed to meet the unique needs of social science researchers, but anyone with similar needs is welcome. Services include:

  • Easy-to-use Windows servers with more power than a laptop or desktop and the most popular statistical software installed and ready for use.
  • Powerful interactive Linux servers.
  • A 5,000+ core Slurm cluster for large computing jobs, including GPUs for machine learning.
  • A restricted data environment for working with HIPAA or other sensitive data. It is remotely accessible and contains Windows servers, interactive Linux servers, and a small Slurm cluster with GPUs.
  • Statistical consultants/research computing facilitators who can assist you in using the servers as well as helping with data and analysis challenges.
  • Training on statistical software and applied statistics topics, and an extensive statistical computing Knowledge Base.

Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC)

CHTC manages over 20,000 cores and dozens of GPUs for the UW-Madison campus; this resource, which is free and shared, aims to advance the mission of the University of Wisconsin in support of the Wisconsin Idea. Researchers can place their workloads on an access point at CHTC and utilize the resources at CHTC, across the campus, and across the nation.

CHTC’s Research Facilitation team empowers researchers to utilize computing to achieve their goals. The Research Facilitation approach emphasizes teaching users skills and methodologies to manage & automate workloads on resources like those at CHTC, the campus, or across the world.

Data Science Institute (DSI)

The Data Science Institute collaborates with on- and off-campus researchers, industry, and community partners to solve problems and derive meaning and value from data. DSI data scientists and research software engineers will work with you to build solutions tailored to your needs. They can also partner with you on proposals for extramural funding with a data science component.

The Data Science Institute owns and operates GPU clusters that can be used for GPU-intensive applications such as training and tuning AI models.

Research Cyberinfrastructure (RCI)

DoIT’s Research Cyberinfrastructure (RCI) team partners with research leadership and academic units to provide a robust, secure, and evolving infrastructure that enables the work of researchers in all disciplines and aligns with UW–‍Madison’s research mission and strategic priorities. Services include:

  • Cloud computing support
  • ResearchDrive and other data storage
  • Globus
  • Electronic Lab Notebooks
  • Data Science Platform (Posit Connect)