A message from Lois Brooks, vice provost for information technology and chief information officer:
UW–Madison’s IT community faces an inspiring challenge as the university embarks on the Wisconsin Research, Innovation and Scholarly Excellence (RISE) Initiative. It will be up to us to build and maintain the computing infrastructure these audacious new cross-disciplinary research endeavors will need to achieve groundbreaking discoveries. As we look ahead, we must ensure our people and our technology foundation can meet these growing demands while remaining flexible enough to adapt to emerging needs.
Infrastructure for tomorrow’s challenges
The RISE Initiative represents one of the most significant research investments in UW–Madison’s history. Success will require not just talented researchers and modern facilities but also robust computing infrastructure. Whether studying climate systems, developing new medical treatments, or advancing artificial intelligence, our faculty and students need access to significant computational resources to be leaders in their fields.
To support those ambitions, UW–Madison must advance its computing infrastructure, including storage, networking, and cloud and computing resources, as well as add a research data center that can support leading-edge computing.
I’m happy to say we’re on the right track to meet those ambitions. Thanks in part to generous support from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the university is making a substantial, coordinated and sustained investment in talent and technical infrastructure to support future research computing. We’re investing in cutting-edge GPU (graphics processing unit) servers and cloud-based research computing infrastructure to benefit all university researchers—not just those directly involved in RISE.
Building our research computing teams
Of course, those servers won’t run themselves. Our investment strategy prioritizes human expertise alongside computing resources. The university’s investment will support hiring 20+ new data scientists, software engineers, research facilitators and other crucial research staff, who will bring expertise in high-performance computing, research data management, AI/ML (artificial intelligence/machine learning) infrastructure support and cloud computing architecture.
This investment in people is essential to realizing the full potential of our technology investments. These staff will join the teams in research support centers across the university to extend their expertise and capacity to support the university’s growing research community.
Collaboration is key to realizing the value of investing in more people to support research growth. We’re not just adding computing power—we’re scaling communities of research computing and data science professionals who directly support researchers, enabling them to leverage these advanced resources effectively.
Accelerating discovery through mass-scale computing
The pace of scientific discovery is increasingly tied to the ability to process and analyze enormous amounts of data. Whether simulating complex physical systems or training machine learning models on vast datasets, researchers need access to significant computing power.
University IT services like the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC) are already providing crucial resources to help researchers level-up their data processing and computations. For example, CHTC helped UW’s GLUE Lab scale up its research on cattle movement and land use in Brazil, making it possible for the researchers to reduce their database processing time—from 2 days down to just hours—without having to wait for external funding or pay for cloud computing services.
The kind of computing power CHTC offers will become more crucial as RISE hires come on board and more cross-discipline researchers begin using university computing resources.
The university is also developing a forward-looking data center strategy to ensure our physical infrastructure keeps pace with growing research computing demands. Expect more details on our data center strategy later this spring.
Supporting AI advancements to benefit all
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have the potential to transform research across disciplines. From analyzing medical images to modeling climate systems, AI tools are becoming essential to modern research. Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin has called for UW to build its capacity to contribute to “both the core technical dimensions as well as the human-centered implications of AI.” Accomplishing that lofty goal will require IT leadership, infrastructure and investment.
These aren’t purely abstract goals. UW’s existing computational resources are already helping researchers use machine learning to augment their work. For instance, the ICU Data Science Lab uses AI to help identify patients at risk of clinical deterioration before they need intensive care, create algorithms and decision support tools to help deliver personalized care, and identify and help treat substance misuse in hospitalized patients.
The RISE initiatives will enable dozens of such labs throughout the university, and they will need a lot of secure, high-performance computing and storage infrastructure to make it possible. How we support the new faculty who come to the university thanks to RISE will develop over time as the new faculty arrive and we get a clearer vision of their research needs.
Looking ahead together
This transformation in research computing infrastructure isn’t just about hardware and software—it’s about people. Success requires close collaboration between researchers, IT professionals and administrative leaders.
As we move forward with the RISE Initiative and other research priorities, we must ensure our computing infrastructure evolves to meet these challenges. This evolution requires careful planning, sustained investment and ongoing collaboration across the university community. Together, we can build the computing infrastructure needed to power tomorrow’s discoveries.
Best,
—Lois
This is part of our Envision the Future blog series examining key technology trends and opportunities in higher education. Join us each month as we explore different facets of UW–Madison’s IT future.
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