![](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/circphoto2-630x420.png\")
\u201cWe get as many from the Medical Center as we do the River Campus,\u201d Mort says.
\nAll modules are taught by the CIRC staff. All sessions are at capacity, but there are openings for the upcoming Winter Boot Camp, which runs from late January to early March.<\/p>\n
The boot camps offer students, staff, and faculty training in how to write code and run applications that can take advantage of the computing and storage horsepower available at the University.<\/p>\n
\u201cTypically, many institutions install these systems and only the capable few have access to them and know how to harness these advanced hardware and software tools for research,\u201d Mort says. \u201cWe provide opportunities for everyone in the research community to learn how to use these tools and obtain a better understanding of how they can help with data analytics and processing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The classes also focus on \u201creal-world research problems,\u201d Mort says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe take a look at actual research data sets and use them as case studies during our classes,\u201d he says. \u201cWe are relatively unique in that we offer these opportunities for the research community, a combination of real-world application-based training for novice users and access to high-performance systems where students and faculty can try out their programs and adapt them to their data seats and computational needs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alex Xu \u201917 is a biology major from Beijing, China, who recently took an SAS class taught by CIRC assistant director Will DiGrazio. SAS is a software suite that can mine, alter, manage, and retrieve data from a variety of sources and perform statistical analysis on it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI took it because statistics is a crucial part of almost all experimental sciences,\u201d Xu says. \u201cThe Bluehive platform encouraged me to learn it for the purpose of analyzing my computational population genomic research in a pipeline fashion.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bluehive is the University\u2019s advanced, high-performance computer cluster. It consists of many server computers tightly coupled by a high-speed interconnect and is attached to a shared storage pool, aggregated by software, which makes it a fast multi-user supercomputer.<\/p>\n
Xu didn\u2019t know much about SAS \u201cother than it\u2019s a popular stats tool.\u201d He said the course offered a good introduction to other options.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith this basis knowledge, I can try and explore more in the future,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
The VISTA Collaboratory is a 1,000 square foot visualization lab completed in June 2014. VISTA stands for Visualiziation, Innovation, Science, Technology, and Application. The collaboratory\u00a0consists of 24 displays in a curved 6-by-4 matrix and is equipped with an interactive, tiled-display wall that renders massive data sets in real time, which allows researchers the ability to visualize and analyze complex data instantaneously and collaboratively with colleagues and students.<\/p>\n
Mort says the collaboratory stands out as a computational resource because of its size (20 feet by 8 feet), its unified 50-megapixel resolution across a curved display, and its direct optical connectivity to the University\u2019s supercomputing infrastructure.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we have here is really something special among universities,\u201d Mort says. \u201cThe CIRC classes are a great way to show it off and have an interactive experience. We don\u2019t know anyone in the country that has all the components that make the VISTA what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mort says the one prerequisite is that everyone enrolled should be computer literate.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe expect folks to be able to understand the research problems they\u2019re trying to solve,\u201d he says. \u201cWe want them to interact with that data and be involved with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
That said, all are welcome.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt really is for everyone who wants to learn,\u201d Mort says. \u201cAnd you\u2019re never too old or too young to learn.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The University’s third annual “summer school” in big data gives everyone from undergraduates to tenured faculty a chance to learn how programming and data visualization could impact their research projects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":672,"featured_media":174532,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[18612,11716],"class_list":["post-174452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus-community","tag-announcements","tag-data-science"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n