The Research Computing Support (RCS) Group at NACS is composed of 4 people with particular abilities for assisting scientists with most aspects of Research Computing, from introduction to Linux and using the bash shell to Geographical Informations Systems, to data manipulation to various kinds of analysis, visualizations, and high performance computing, including optimization of parallel code for cluster computing.
Some of the questions we can help answer are along the lines of:
How to set up and admininister a linux desktop or storage server to provide centralized storage to my lab?
What Open Source Software (OSS) is available to do X, Y, Z? On a Mac? On a Windows PC? On Linux?
Can Open Source Software run on Windows? On a Mac? Or do I have to set up a Linux system to get access to it? (No).
How do I run all this Open Source Software on my Windows PC? Do I really need to run Linux? (No. It's probably easiest on Linux, but it's not necesary. See this doc.
How I can cheaply get a lot of good disk space appropriate for research purposes (like highest speed or better reliability). Well, this is one way
How I can cheaply do backups of my most critical diskspaces? Here are some OSS Backup evaluations that NACS is doing now.
How can my lab gain access to commercial software as cheaply as possible? (UCI has licensed many such packages and some of them are available for no cost via our Windows Application server (need URL for this) or the BDUC cluster (MATLAB, SAS)
Are there OSS or cheaper equivalents for MATLAB? (yes - Octave), Office Suites (yes - OpenOffice (OSS), Softmaker Office (cheap), Photoshop (maybe, depending on what you need it for), etc.
I need to analyze a file that has 10 million lines and it won't fit into Excel. How do I do that? (Perl or Python) Will you do it for me? (Maybe we already have, it depends on how you want it processed).
How I can get a cheap and easy research group webpages up and running?
If you or your faculty would be interested in speaking to any or all members of the RCS staff about your research computing needs or problems, please contact the staff members below directly.
harry.mangalam@uci.edu, 949 824 0084 (o), 949 285 4487(c)
Commercial and NonProfit Bioinformatics companies
PostDoc in Fly Genetics, Salk Inst, 1993
PhD in Physiology and Pharmacology, UCSD, 1989
MSc in Comparative Physiology, UBC, 1985
Bioinformatics, Visualization, Linux shell, data manipulation (slicing, reduction, format interchange), workflow, network data movement, code profiling & optimization, Storage/Backup, custom programming (Perl, Python, C, bash, with documentation, see below), Open Source Software, cluster operation and/or the SGE queueing system, code co-development (svn, trac, wikis, forums, etc).