The Research Computing Center advances scholarship at the University of Chicago by enabling research by providing high performance computing resources.
The department supplies high performance computing and visualization resources, access to software, workshops, one-on-one consulting with domain experts, and complete data management strategies to researchers across all disciplines.
In recent years, computing has become increasingly more important to scholars to the extent where it is now widely recognized as the third pillar of science, along with theory and experimentation. As computing technologies advance, the problems that modern hardware and software can address are growing continually in scope and at a faster pace. Concomitant with the growth in capabilities is a rapid increase in the complexity of maintaining cutting edge high performance equipment and developing scientific applications that perform efficiently on new hardware, setting the stage for the centrally managed RCC.
Research Computing, within the Office of the Vice President for Research and National Laboratories, was created in early 2010 as a result of a year-long review process set in motion by President Robert Zimmer and carried out by an ad hoc Committee on Research Computing Infrastructure chaired by Donald Levy, Vice President for Research and for National Laboratories, and supported by a team of outside experts.
