Services
New England Research Cloud (NERC)
The New England Research Cloud (NERC) is a part of the Mass Open Cloud Alliance and offers a unique, self-service dashboard that enables researchers to create projects, add team members, and incorporate various resources like user-friendly web interfaces, storage databases, and containerized computing environments. NERC utilizes Red Hat Inc. OpenStack and OpenShift along with open source resources (e.g., XDMoD, ColdFront). This combination allows researchers to interact with CPU and GPU-based computing, block and object data storage, and I/O network infrastructures in innovative ways not achievable with traditional high-performance computing (HPC) setups. NERC’s cloud facilitators further enhance collaboration, assisting researchers with transitioning, architecture design, and technical support. This sets NERC apart from commercial public cloud providers and fills the skill gap needed by research and teaching professionals.
Number of Supported Institutions
Academic Courses
Research Projects
Regulated Data Services
Univ. RCD offers Regulated Data (ReD) Services to assist researchers with data analytics and computational studies on regulated data, such as claims data from CMS or genetic data from NIH dbGaP. Our ReD services provide access to scale-out compute, storage, database, and standard analytics software, hosted within a secure cloud enclave that meets NIST 800-53 (FISMA-moderate and NIST 800-171 (CUI) standards.
Central GPU Cluster
In FY25, OVPR partnered with University RCD to build a Central GPU cluster to support the ever-growing use of Artificial Intelligence broadly across Harvard’s research enterprise. The Central GPU service strives to (1) empower interdisciplinary AI/ML research, (2) meet the increasing demand for GPUs and (3) mitigate costly individual GPU investments by Labs/Centers. In addition, this service lowers the barrier to entry by providing simple HarvardKey access as well as seamless access to both on-prem and cloud computing resources under the same user interface. This year, a minimum viable product (MVP) for both cloud and on-prem resources will be completed with a new partnership between TPS cloud engineers and Univ RCD systems engineers.
Harvard Research Data Connect
The Harvard Research Data Connect is a collaborative project across Harvard Library, HUIT, Research Computing, and OVPR. With a vision to support the entire research data lifecycle by providing researchers with an ecosystem that connects them with computing infrastructure, commonly used software, services, tools, and applications for finding, accessing, managing, analyzing, and sharing data. Importantly, it aims to connect (1) researchers with staff and (2) staff-to-staff across Harvard who are subject matter experts.
Grant Support
At University Research Computing and Data Services, we provide faculty members with aid in obtaining funding and crafting research proposals for projects that require resources such as technical personnel support, analytics infrastructure, cloud resources, or expertise in research computing and research software engineering. Our services are particularly useful for initiatives focused on digital scholarship.
Number of Supported Grants
The Northeast Storage Exchange (NESE)
The Northeast Storage Exchange (NESE) is a collaborative project of the MGHPCC and its founding partners to deploy a regional resource that addresses the escalating need for short, medium, and long-term storage of research data.