Interview: Steve Cundy, Director, UBC Advanced Research Computing

What is the operational role of your unit on campus?

UBC Advanced Research Computing (ARC) provides institutionally-dedicated resources and support services for researchers across all disciplines working on questions that have significant or specialized data and computational needs. Working with institutional, national, regional and industry partners, we offer services and resources to empower researchers and accelerate time to discovery and innovation through the use of leading digital research infrastructure.

ARC provides training, consulting, and access to high-performance computing platforms such as Sockeye, Chinook, and RONIN to the UBC research community. Sockeye is UBC’s high-performance computing system that can enable months’ worth of work to be done in weeks or less when compared to traditional personal computers. Our object storage platform, Chinook, provides a place for research data files to be securely stored and shared – launched to meet the needs of researchers working with an ever-increasing amount of data, video, and images. Furthermore, our team of experts is available to work alongside any member of the UBC research community to evaluate what technical solutions are best suited to meet their research requirements. We also provide research data management support to researchers and offer specialized software, such as REDCap and Globus which are both secure applications for collecting, tracking, and managing research data.
 

What are some of the different ways that your Unit can support on-ground research on campus?

ARC provides a single point of contact for all requests relating to research computing infrastructure, platforms, and services, whether the service is provided by ARC or one of our many partners. This may include providing access to locally available digital research infrastructure and resources, consulting on privacy, security, grant proposals, and research data management, operating and supporting our institutionally dedicated HPC cluster and storage service, or facilitating onboarding to the National platforms and commercial cloud. 

Additionally, we are also mandated to provide training and education to the research community. This includes hands-on workshops, online training events, and one-on-one support to ensure that researchers of all disciplines and skill levels have access to our platforms and resources throughout the course of the calendar year.
 

What potential research opportunities excite you the most, with regard to your unit’s function?

A few areas of growth in which I can foresee ARC’s participation include AI/Machine Learning platforms, cloud computing, data management platforms, web or graphical user interface to HPC clusters, and quantum computing. Currently, the expanding growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning is extremely exciting, and given that UBC is home to top leaders and innovators in the field, we are extremely well positioned to provide high-impact, comprehensive support for new innovations and discoveries. 
 

What are your operational constraints in incubating on-the-ground research?

With technology, there is always the constraint of maintaining existing infrastructure while simultaneously advancing in other areas. ARC proactively supports pilot projects to gain better understanding on how best to utilize certain platforms and tools to support UBC research. Another operational constraint that we face is the availability of computing infrastructure, which is very much a key component of the research we support. As both federal and our institutional computing hardware sees constant utilization, we have to be extremely resourceful and strategic when ensuring our researchers have access to the resources they need to meet publication and conference deadlines. Demand for computational power to support research has never been higher, specifically specialized processors such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). We are also seeing a sharp rise in available software, platforms, and tools. Integrating and supporting fresh capabilities is always a challenge, and the sheer amount of new solutions requires us to be dynamic in our approach to delivering the research services necessary for UBC research activities.
 

What are your past research collaborations?

ARC is a research support unit and as such, does not collaborate directly on research projects. However, of the many different projects we have supported across the institution, from grant applications through to project closure or anything in between, here are a few examples of recent projects acknowledging the support ARC had provided:  

• TURJUMAN: A Public Tool for Neural Arabic Machine Translation. Visit site
• Automated discovery of noncovalent inhibitors of SARS-CoV-2 main protease by consensus Deep Docking of 40 billion small molecules. Visit site
• Eight papers accepted from UBC Computer Vision Group by CVPR 2021. Visit site
   

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