Research Computing: Examples of Our Work

We provide comprehensive research support. Read on to learn about some of the projects we've been involved in.

AI Research Projects

Our AI research consultation team has consulted on a variety of projects including:

Helped a researcher run whisper speech recognition software on the Great Lakes cluster to transcribe audio files at scale.
Consulted with a PhD candidate on using Google Gemini provided through U-M to extract structured data from images for further analysis.
Identified specific hardware requirements for a GPU workstation to capably serve local LLMs for text generation within simulations, maximizing system performance under a constrained budget.
Advised on the correct classification of datasets to ensure researchers meet university standards on data privacy and security while harnessing the power of AI.
Consulted on cost-effective options for using cloud-hosted AI providers as burst capacity when existing Claude and OpenAI approaches proved too costly or prone to timeouts.
Demonstrated running open-weights models on the Great Lakes cluster using Ollama, enabling secure local inference of medium to large scale (32-200B parameter) models as part of a larger research workflow.

Digital Scholarship (DS)

Our Digital Scholarship group supports digital projects in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. Examples of our digital scholarship work can be found on the Digital Scholarship Studio Portfolio site, and more information on this service is available on our Digital Scholarship Studio page.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

Our GIS group does work ranging from field equipment support to consulting for web and mobile mapping applications to classroom StoryMaps workshops. Visit the U-M ArcGIS Online Gallery for examples of what's being done with digital GIS at the University, or learn more about this service on our GIS Consulting page.

High-Performance Computing (HPC)

Our HPC group provides help utilizing campus-wide and local cluster computing resources for research, including training classes and workshops for the entire U-M community. Examples of past projects include:

Adding CVMFS filesystem to UM Great Lakes Compute Cluster to support CERN researchers from Michigan and elsewhere. This project resulted in new non-UM researchers using UM resources and generating new revenue streams for UM. The filesystem was first piloted on LSA resources and later adopted as a permanent resource by ARC.
Teaching tailored workshops to introduce Economics students to high performance computing using proprietary data sets to simulate the specific problems they would encounter. Our team is glad to provide tailored workshops for labs, departments and courses.
Transferred a researcher's software into the cluster environment. The analysis she was doing took 72 hours on her laptop, which she could not use for other purposes during that time. Using Great Lakes, the same analysis took 8 hours.
The University of Michigan Research Computing Package is the result of a partnership between LSA Technology Services and U-M Information Technology Services (ITS) to offer active (Turbo) and archival (Data Den) storage at no cost to all LSA researchers.

Research Software Engineering (RSE)

Our Research Software Engineering group provides custom application design and development to support research activities. Some examples of our work include:

Developing a cross-platform mobile application to interact with 3D models in augmented reality.
Writing a custom R package to import, interface with, and analyze specialized research data in a NoSQL database.
Creating interactive tasks for psychology research in MATLAB/Psychtoolbox, PsychoPy, and PsychoJS/Pavlovia.
Adding functionality to and improving performance of a MATLAB-based predator-prey dynamics simulator.
Creating a LabVIEW-based API to drive a set of three-axis motion controllers.
Devloping high-performance Python code to process sensor data from an Arduino microcontroller.

More detailed descriptions of a wider range of our projects are available on our portfolio site, or read more about this service on our Research Software Engineering page.

User Groups:	Faculty Services ; Researcher Services
Categories:	Research Support & Tools

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Research Computing: Examples of Our Work

AI Research Projects

Digital Scholarship (DS)

Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

High-Performance Computing (HPC)

Research Software Engineering (RSE)

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