CDSA Monthly Update: May 2025

Welcome to your May CDSA e-update - where we share news and updates about Compute and Data Services Alliance (CDSA) initiatives, services, tools, and enhancements.

• Tech Expo is May 16! If you’re attending – you’ll see CDSA-affiliated Research Toolkits: “Computing Your Way to Academic Glory” (Katie Kilroy) and “Using Duke Data Attic for Research Data” (Jimmy Dorff), and Will Sexton-affiliated – “The Origins of Computing at Duke.” Jimmy Dorff and Jeremy Thornhill also just presented at the Globus World Conference “Packing Files Into Duke’s Data Attic” and Tim Chilton and Owais Raza will be presenting at the Educause Cybersecurity & Privacy Conference “Duke’s Protected Network for Research – Helping Researchers Navigate Compliance.”
• We had a fun, lively and informative CDSA Researcher Reception on April 24, where CDSA held a posters showcase of some of the initiatives and services. Photos can be viewed 04.24.25 researcher reception photos. Thanks to all for attending and if you have any follow up questions or feedback, please reach out to us.
• The Finder Tool team is looking for feedback from the research community. If you, or a researcher you know, is willing to review the "Finder Tool", please reach out to Rebecca Brouwer to schedule a time in May with one of the team members. The Finder Tool is designed to help researchers across Duke determine the appropriate storage and compute solutions based on information about the users and the project's data.
• Have you heard about NCShare? A broad coalition of North Carolina institutions, including Duke, are building a state-wide cyberinfrastructure, leveraging the power of high-speed networking, shared computational capacity, and state-of-the-art GPUs to create a path toward innovation in higher education and research. NSF funded, NCShare accommodates a wide range of computational needs, from interactive sessions using tools like RStudio and Jupyter Notebooks, to parallel workflows for large-scale computations. 

At Duke, Dr. Josh Granek, Assistant Professor in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, said this about his experience so far with NCShare: “As Director of Education for PreMiEr, I am thrilled to have NC Share as resource for education and research. PreMiEr is a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center that studies and improves the microbiomes of the built environment. It spans five universities in North Carolina: Duke, NC A&T, UNC Chapel Hill, UNC Charlotte, and NCSU. Early on, we struggled to figure out how we could teach PreMiEr trainees from each of these universities to do research computing, when each university had different research computing infrastructure. When I found out about NCShare, I knew it was the answer we didn’t imagine existed. The most challenging question I get when I teach research computing is: “Once this workshop is over, what computing resources can I use to apply what I have learned to my own research data”. With NCShare, I now have an easy answer.” To learn more about utilizing NCShare – please visit their website or email them at info@ncshare.org.