Information Commons Computational Environments

Questions? Contact Academic Research Services (ARS)

Overview

Information Commons (IC) offers multiple secure computational environments to support diverse research needs. These environments are designed for working with sensitive and de-identified data, offering different configurations for compute power, storage, data, and software access. 

Selecting the right environment depends on your project's technical requirements, software needs, and budget.

IC on Research Analysis Environment (RAE)

The Research Analysis Environment (RAE) provides research teams with a professionally managed, secure, collaborative environment in which to manage files containing sensitive data. RAE also provides remote desktop capability with applications (e.g., Azure Data Studio, SSMS, Jupyter Notebook, RStudio, Stata, SAS) that allow investigators to view, manipulate, and save their data entirely in a protected environment without requiring files to be stored locally.

Choose if:

  • You require specific licensed software on RAE for your analysis.
  • You intend to extract the data you need and download it onto your computer.
  • You would like a managed environment pre-configured for working with IC data with minimal setup.

Access: 

For detailed information on how to access and work with IC on RAE, see the Information Commons on RAE Wiki.

IC Wynton + App Server

Wynton HPC is a large, shared high-performance compute cluster (SGE) at UCSF, available to all researchers and tailored to diverse biomedical and health science computing needs.

Choose If:

  • Your computer's memory, storage, and CPU/GPU are not sufficient for your analysis.
  • You conduct most of your analysis using Python.

Access:

For detailed information on how to access and work with IC on Wynton, see the Information Commons on Wynton Wiki.

IC AWS Secure

IC AWS Secure is an AWS Secure Enterprise Cloud-based computational environment featuring PHI-compliance, accelerated computing with CPU nodes and GPUs, and flexible configuration options for research. Includes various data storage solutions and the ability to launch AWS EMR clusters (Apache Spark with Yarn) for distributed computing.

Choose If:

  • Your project is funded, and you have budgeted for computation (IC AWS Secure is recharge-based).
  • Your project has uniquely heavy computation requirements that can't be fulfilled by other environments.
  • You do not have long-term plans to purchase and maintain your own hardware for research.

Access:

For detailed information on how to access and work with IC on AWS SEC, see the Information Commons on AWS Secure Wiki.