About Us

The Scalable Compute Archive (SCA) - both a software suite and the team that manages it - builds, delivers, and operates customized web applications integrated with secure data management systems and scientific software application pipelines. We partner with research groups taking on their data management to enable them become better data stewards. Originally a part of the Research Technologies division of UITS at Indiana University, the SCA team moved to the IU School of Medicine, and in particular into the umbrella of Center for Computational Biology & Bioinformatics and Center for Neuroimaging.

Background

Indiana University has a long history of outstanding research cyberinfrastructure benefiting scientists, researchers and the larger IU community as they pursue a broad range of more than 150 research disciplines.

In particular, the cyberinfrastructure offered by the Research Technologies (RT) division of IU-UITS includes:

Supercomputing clusters (Big Red 3, Carbonate, Quartz; coming soon: Big Red 200) The Research Desktop (RED) Archival storage (Scholarly Data Archive) Disk storage systems (Slate Project, DCWAN, etc.) Research software & services Visualization support

The SCA core offerings

The Scalable Compute Archive (IU SCA) offers many solutions in support of researchers, labs and centers at IU as well as previously supporting other teams within Research Technologies. Primarily, this involves custom web applications providing researchers with a simple, automated interfaces to complex cyberinfrastructure – be it IU’s storage resources, the Scholarly Data Archive, IU’s supercomputing clusters, or compute resources on our own hardware infrastructure. This allows researchers to focus on the science, rather than the technical hurdles inherent to such systems.

We take on the architectural design, development, deployment, testing and maintenance of these complex service stacks applications while leveraging domain expertise and business logic contributed by our partners. We bridge the challenges domain scientists and labs encounter in using high performance computing and storage systems.

The SCA mindset:

Focus on your research/science, let us focus on the computer science

Our mission is to allow researchers to focus on the science instead of the computer science. In doing so, we partner with IU researchers and staff to design, develop and operate bespoke solutions to their specific needs. These solutions are developed rapidly and with a deep level of collaboration with our partners and clients. We provide secure, web-based access to scientific workflows and data management systems via highly customized user-interfaces. All with a strong emphasis on workflow and usability.

SCA Operations (DevOps)

Backing up our software development and project management services, SCA provides a strong operational background to ensure these services are reliable, performant, and secure. Under the SCA-OPS umbrella, we operate several dozen systems running on our own on-premises physical hardware (both physical and QEMU/KVM virtual machines), as well as IU Intelligent Infrastructure and Google Cloud VMs.

To support the user-facing elements of our services, SCA Operations provides a number of backend components and operational tools including nginx web servers, MongoDB and MariaDB database servers, Docker containerization and execution environments, comprehensive logging, monitoring and audit tools, and ansible/puppet for service deployments.

We also operate a number of other services using vended software and/or remote desktop systems to provide specific research groups secure access to sensitive data, as well as compute and archival pipelines. Vended software we run includes domain-specific tools like XNAT, CbioPortal, and MDClone.

Formerly, SCA provided system administration, development, and consultation services to sister teams within Research Technologies. This included helping run internal tools for RT staff members to gain insight on their own services, as well as user-facing services like RStudio Connect and HPC everywhere.

Security embedded in our mindset

We strive to balance security and reliability with ease-of-use. In collaboration with the IU Center for Advanced Cybersecurity Research (CACR), we have developed a comprehensive set of security controls based on NIST-800-53. We support projects that work with electronically Protected Health Information (ePHI), and the bulk of these same controls are in place on all systems we operate.

SCA Team

We are a team of IT professional with diverse backgrounds including a computer scientist serving as team leader and senior developer role, operations lead with a Linux hacker background, a neuroscience developer with a PhD in brain sciences, two research software developers with a computer science and programming background, a former team leader with a CS and interdisciplinary science background, and a former web applications technical lead with a PhD in astronomy. The People section has more details about each of us!