A Q&A platform for researchers, facilitators, sysadmins and others who do research computing.

Biology IT is a collaborative effort of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. We work with faculty, staff and graduate students in the biological sciences to ensure that their computing experience is fast, stable and secure. We provide system support, backup, software licensing, research IT consulting and access to high-performance computers.

Got 15 minutes and want to learn the basics of Git?

R is a tool for statistics and data modeling. The R programming language is elegant, versatile, and has a highly expressive syntax designed around working with data. R is more than that, though — it also includes extremely powerful graphics capabilities. If you want to easily manipulate your data and present it in compelling ways, R is the tool for you.

Data Carpentry is non-profit organization that develops and provides data skills training to researchers.

Research conducted by ISU scientists is complex, collaborative, and multidisciplinary. The development of cutting-edge computational expertise and resources on the ISU campus promises to enable researchers to develop and exploit data repositories, knowledge bases, analytic tools, and infrastructure that will allow a broad spectrum of scientists, engineers, and business leaders to formulate and test novel hypotheses and develop solutions to the world’s pressing problems.

Iowa State University Library's Data Management Plan Guide will help you in the process of writing a DMP for your grant proposal.

The DataNet Federation Consortium is a project within the NSF Office of Cyber-Infrastructure DataNet initiative. The goal of the DataNet Federation Consortium is to assemble national data infrastructure that enables collaborative research, through federation of existing data management infrastructure.

This website is designed to help you understand some basic git concepts visually. This is my first attempt at using both SVG and D3. I hope it is helpful to you. Adding/staging your files for commit will not be covered by this site. In all sandbox playgrounds on this site, just pretend that you always have files staged and ready to commit at all times. If you need a refresher on how to add or stage files for commit, please read Git Basics.

The Genome Informatics Facility of the Iowa State University Office of Biotechnology.

Learn the basics of common Git workflows used by enterprise teams and assess their ability to fit your individual needs in this Atlassian Git tutorial.

This site gives a good explanation of how to get started using Gnu Parallel, which can be used to break up data files into chunks that can be run concurrently rather than serially processing through the entire file.

The High Performance Computing facility in Durham Center provides access to petascale systems that support large-scale computing needs for scientific and instructional endeavors at Iowa State University. View a list of systems and equipment.

Developed by the Colleges of Engineering and Liberal Arts and Sciences and Information Technology Services, this handbook is intended to provide answers to common IT questions at Iowa State University. Features This handbook is written to be the starting point of an IT technician's search. For many of the topics in this document, instructions and supplemental information are available through existing IT websites. In most cases, this document links directly to these materials. Topics are laid out by chapter and linked from both the Table of Contents and the Index. Supplemental information, such as a list of ITS contacts, is available in the appendix. This handbook is intended for employees of ISU.

Introduction to parallel computing on Intel KNL servers (like our Legion cluster).

Meteor is a complete platform for building web and mobile apps in pure JavaScript.

Please contact us, and we'll be happy to help you find the right storage solution.

 An explanation of why vectorizing your R code often results in improved performance.

The OSF is a free and open source service to collaborate and stay organized while still using your favorite external services. OSF helps in cloud based management of projects. OSF is a helpful tool for students to understand and apply sound data management principles to their work. And there is easy access to all of the files the students are working with, it greatly enhances to provide constructive guidance. OSF provides services such as centralization, organization and anywhere-access to saving time and energy necessary for managing these projects.

ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized.

You can find thing like tutorials, examples, and some of the code we use to manage our software and servers on our GitHub repo.

Singularity container and workflow management.

Software Carpentry is a volunteer non-profit organization dedicated to teaching basic computing skills to researchers.

Spack is a package management tool designed to support multiple versions and configurations of software on a wide variety of platforms and environments. It was designed for large supercomputing centers, where many users and application teams share common installations of software on clusters with exotic architectures, using libraries that do not have a standard ABI. Spack is non-destructive: installing a new version does not break existing installations, so many configurations can coexist on the same system.

Omics Pipe is a Python framework for automating ‘best practice’ next generation sequencing pipelines. Omics Pipe can be run from the command-line by providing it with a YAML parameter file specifying your directory structure and software specific parameters. This executes a parallel automated pipeline on a Distributed Resource Management system (local cluster or Amazon Web Services (AWS)) that efficiently handles job resource allocation, monitoring and restarting. The goals of Omics Pipe are to provide researchers with an open-source computational solution to implement ‘best practice’ pipelines with minimal development overhead and providing visual outputs to aid the researcher.

Iowa State University's VPN uses encryption to securely and safely connect you into the ISU network when you are off campus. 

Recordings of Xsede training sessions.