Research Computing

Our research facilitation experts provide a range of services and solutions for campus researchers. Learn about what we offer and how we can help.

Data-Driven Research on Campus begins with Integrated DigitaL Infrastructure

UC Merced's Cyberinfrastructure and Research Technologies (CIRT) team strives to bring research computing, high-speed networking, and advanced visualization to campus researchers across all disciplines. We can help you use supercomputers to work faster, visualize the complexity of your data to work smarter, and collaborate across campus or around the world for broader impacts.

We utilize approaches that are flexible enough to accommodate your needs, while still adhering to proven best practices. We can help you manage the complex relationship with the computing technology you use to advance your work.

We offer free training and mentoring, drop-in office hours, and consultation services that provide advice on scholarly workflows, equipment purchases, and assistance in using advanced cyberinfrastructure such as high performance computing (HPC) on MERCED cluster and Pinnacles cluster, active research data storage on BorgStore, visualization on the Wide Area Visualization Environment (WAVE), and data collaboration using the 10-40Gbps Science DMZ research network.

In partnership with the UC Merced Library, we offer a variety of workshops in Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry. We also offer customizable workshops in GitHub, Jupyterlab (aka Jupyter Notebooks), and targeted HPC training.


UNCOMMON ACCESS. Endless Possibilities.


CIRT facilitates access to on-campus computational resources and helps to scale your workflows to regional and national HPC resources. CIRT’s mission is to help you navigate across these HPC users with ease.

Interested in scaling your workflows? Schedule a consultation with us!

Pinnacles HPC Cluster


Pinnacles HPC Cluster is UC Merced’s latest MRI acquisition that serves as a centerpiece for high-impact work in UC Merced’s scientific research. This shared computer is used by researchers to advance scientific workflows ranging from quantum chemistry to cognitive science.

Pinnacles cluster is supported by the National Science Foundation Award OAC- 2019144.

Multi-Environment Research Computer for Exploration and Discovery

Merced Cluster


MERCED is UC Merced's on-campus HPC cluster: a 3052-core cluster with a wide variety of common HPC software packages, user-specific software, and advanced scheduling using Slurm.

MERCED is supported by the National Science Foundation Award ACI-1429783 and by the generous support of contributing faculty.

Got a machine learning task? Try the

NAUTILUS Cluster


Cognitive Hardware and Software Ecosystem, Community Infrastructure (CHASE-CI) provides the Nautilus Cluster—a cloud-community-based approach to delivering affordable but advanced data and computation with millions of Graphics Processing Units (GPU) cores for machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) research.

Led by UCSD, CHASE-CI allows researchers across all 10 UC campuses to conduct research into advanced machine-learning techniques in a Kubernetes-orchestrated containerized software environment.

CHASE-CI is supported by the National Science Foundation Award 1730158.

our Services


REsearch server co-Location

CIRT provides co-location services for installation, management and hosting of faculty-owned computational hardware in CIRT-managed data center locations in SE-1, SE-2, SSM, COB-2 and the Computational Research Facility (Borg Cube).

Active Research Data Storage

CIRT provides storage for your active primary research data. Designed to be robust, reliable, and easy to access for users on MERCED cluster, this storage is recommended for the following:

  • Data Storage for active research workflows on MERCED cluster
  • Fast read-write data access to and from MERCED cluster compute nodes

General Consults & Facilitation

CIRT provides personalized expertise to improve your lab workflow, assist in the design of your project, or fill in compute or data storage requirement for a grant. Schedule a consultation with our team of experts for a personalized recommendation!

Access to research computing clusters

CIRT provides access to the MERCED cluster and other research computing systems.

Click below to find more information and to request your access!

Software installation request

CIRT provides help in installing properly-licensed academic or commercial software on Research Computing-managed servers or clusters.

Data Management

Through a partnership with the University Library, Research IT offers services in developing a Data Management Plan for research data, including sensitive research data such as HIPAA data through the use of the DMPTool (see DMPTool.org). We can also help in specifying application specific storage solutions for purchase.

HPC OFFICE HOURS

CIRT runs weekly office hours to support HPC users. New and veteran HPC users are welcome to drop in for training and help with general and specific questions regarding HPC use and CIRT services.

HPC office hours are a great place to obtain peer mentoring and expert support on topics such as:

  • writing and using code
  • job submission
  • parallelization
  • compiling
  • job arrays

FIND MORE INFORMATION


Contact the Cyberinfrastructure and Research Technologies team to talk about how CIRT can help with your specific research needs.