UMass Amherst’s Research Computing and Data Team Invites Faculty to Explore the Unity High-Performance Computing Platform

UMass Amherst’s Research Computing and Data team invites faculty to explore the collaborative, multi-institutional, high-performance computing (HPC) platform known as Unity. 

All UMass Amherst faculty and staff researchers are eligible to request a Unity account and access support from a team of research computing facilitators and systems administrators. Students are also able to access Unity through faculty and research staff groups. 

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“Research computing plays a pivotal role in advancing groundbreaking research here at UMass,” says Chris Misra, vice chancellor for information services and strategy and chief information officer. “We have recently grown and expanded our Research Computing and Data team to support the important work of our faculty, staff and students.”

Unity’s cutting-edge computing hardware and software are located at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) based in Holyoke. Along with partner institutions UMass Dartmouth, UMass Lowell, UMass Boston, the University of Rhode Island and Mount Holyoke College, Unity provides scholars and researchers with facilitation, education and HPC services.

“High performance computing is increasingly critical to cutting edge research across a wide range of disciplines, from the natural and social sciences to the humanities and fine arts,” says Thomas Bernardin, director of Research Computing and Data and executive director of the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences’ Center for Data Science. “A core value of our team is to reduce barriers to entry and democratize access to state-of-the-art computing resources that accelerate faculty research across the University.”

“Partnerships like this are the foundation that supports groundbreaking research as high-performance computing becomes more broadly impactful,” says Mike Malone, interim provost and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs. “This kind of innovation is essential to faculty and student success.”

UMass Amherst faculty researchers have found Unity to be a cornerstone for fostering innovation, advancing research, deepening students’ knowledge and preparing scholars to advance their research in pathbreaking directions.

The Unity ecosystem has contributed to real-life “gains for human health” according to Peter Chien, professor in biochemistry and molecular biology and the Models to Medicine Center in the Institute for Applied Life Sciences. Chien attributes “unearth[ing] new features of protein structures using AI-enabled prediction systems” and “the ability to train our molecular and cell biology Ph.D. students in the most cutting-edge approaches” through Unity’s resources.

Those cutting-edge approaches are precisely why Charlie Schweik, professor of environmental conservation and public policy, emphasizes the importance of the Research Computing and Data organization to UMass researchers and scholars.

“Unity and Research Computing are critical in our R1 scientific mission and our teaching at all levels,” says Schweik. “Increasingly there will be more faculty, grad students, and even undergraduates who will want to do high-computationally intensive work.” 

Schweik utilizes the cluster for drone-based data collection in EPA-funded salt marsh mapping which was recently cited in an EPA report. He explains that Unity’s facilitation team was “pivotal in enhancing our project's efficiency and steering us towards success. Dealing with HPC environments in a command line interface is a roadblock many data scientists face – we know our code well, but we have not been taught how to work within a command line to queue up jobs to run on an HPC.”

For Kristen DeAngelis, professor in microbiology, Unity plays a crucial role in assembling, annotating and analyzing DNA and RNA sequences for her microbiology research and teaching. DeAngelis says she values the collaborative initiative for enhancing her students’ knowledge and for advancing her National Science Foundation research on microbial ecology and the evolution of climate change. 

“The Unity cluster has been instrumental in our bioinformatics research, but also a necessary part of our teaching program,” DeAngelis says. “I’ve been able to involve undergraduate microbiology students in research and bring them to bioinformatics proficiency using Unity in my MICROBIO 567 Bioinformatics Lab course, a goal that was integral to my NSF CAREER award.”

“I require my entire lab to do their entire Ph.D.s on Unity,” explains Colin Gleason, Armstrong Professor of Professional Development in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “Their future is one where all computing is centralized, so their education as researchers requires them to demonstrate they can thrive in this environment. Everything we do is also simply too big for any other kind of computing.”

Gleason says that Unity’s versatility is indispensable to his students and his research, due in large part to the ability and willingness of UMass Amherst’s Research Computing facilitation staff to provide support on these massive projects. “My students can always get an answer to an environment issue, a path issue, a permissions issue, or a resources issue- all the stuff that normally gets in the way of doing research that requires specialized knowledge to solve,” he says.

With ample room to grow, Bernardin says that Unity is poised to advance research capabilities and services at UMass Amherst and become an increasingly important regional HPC resource. 

More information can be found on the Unity and UMass Amherst Research Computing and Data websites. For questions regarding Unity, please contact Bernardin at tbernard@umass.edu.