Research Computing Infrastructure and Researcher Engagement: Notes from Neuroscience

The advent of the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute (Zuckerman Institute) at Columbia University over a decade ago presented the opportunity to design a discipline-focused Research Computing (RC) group allowing for close collaboration with a relatively fixed number of neuroscience laboratories to enhance discovery. Experiences and observations related to customizing Zuckerman computing infrastructure, creating "task-based" services and systems, and engaging with researchers in our Institute are shared to inform others about establishing discipline-focused research computing teams. Case studies related to providing a GPU cluster service tailored to Institute needs and the evolution of infrastructure choices to hybrid designs allowing bursting to vendor-provided cloud services are reviewed. Future directions involving research software engineering and sharing whole data analysis pipelines are noted.