Data Analytics Research Core

The Data Analytics Research Core (DARC) provides high-performance computing (HPC) in a secure environment for health data with a focus on GPU accelerated AI research. This helps researchers to meet the privacy and security requirements of health information custodians, thus enabling appropriate access to health data for research.

DARC provides:

• High performance computing with multiple machines with multiple TB of RAM, including four GPU servers with 8 x NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and A100 GPUs.
• Secure research data storage is available within the DARC environment for production and archival needs. Costs associated with storing data to be determined on a case by case basis.
• Secure Data transfer with encryption for all traffic in and out of the DARC environment.
• Infrastructure securely housed across multiple data centers on University of Alberta campuses.
• Other research software available includes: R/Rstudio, STATA, SAS (Desktop), Python and FACTS
• Machine learning platforms include TensorFlow, Keras, Caffe, CUDA, and others that are provided within the Lambda Stack.

DARC is supported by the College of Health Sciences along with initial funding from the Alberta Health Services Chair in Health Informatics Research held by Dr. Lawrence Richer.