The Advanced Computing Center (ACC) is a fee-for-service group that provides services for those with computing needs not met by enterprise IT offerings.  

The ACC offers hosting, storage and consulting services for projects that have no direct patient care dependencies. In order to keep costs affordable for the OHSU research community, ACC is a "best effort" shop that does not have the personnel to provide on-demand 24/7 support. 

ACC is also home to the Exacloud compute cluster and the Research Data Storage (RDS) platform.

Location

The facility is housed in a 18,000 square foot data center that provides redundant systems for power, physical security and ample room for growth. Learn more about Data Center West.

Platforms

The center currently supports Windows server, Ubuntu LTS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but has been designed to accommodate almost any current operating system required by the OHSU research community.

The Exacloud compute cluster platform, operated by ACC, provides a batch scheduled compute cluster resource for the OHSU research community.

The ACC also provides access to select tools from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Billing

ACC is moving almost all billing to the USR provided iLab billing platform.

The iLab platform allows us to provide recurring monthly billing (in addition to one-time FY billing) for customers that want it. It also allows customers more control over alias allocation in that multiple aliases can be fractionally assigned by project or by individual service. It reduces the burden on our financial admins and provides powerful reporting tools to our management staff.  If iLab is unsuitable please contact ACC to make alternate payment arrangements (typically a one-time fiscal year billing via IBS using alias, FAID, and fiscal authority).

Infrastructure

In addition to the physical infrastructure housed in Data Center West, the ACC's network infrastructure consists of a number of switches delivering high-speed Ethernet to all hosted resources. This high performance switched architecture is designed to eliminate the network bandwidth contention common in research environments, while allowing reliable high and low bandwidth connections between OHSU researchers, the internet and OHSU's connection to Internet2. 

Storage

ACC offers a number of high-performance, highly available network solutions that serve to UNIX/Linux, Windows and Macintosh client machines via the NFS and CIFS protocols. The newly acquired Research Data Storage platform now provides reliable network storage in larger quantities than were previously available.

Reliability

ACC's tape backup system consists of a dedicated high-end server with multiple high-speed network, SCSI and fiber channel interfaces for high-speed backups and restores. The system currently performs a full backup every week and daily incremental backups, as well as optional custom backup schedules tuned for customer needs. In addition, an off-site tape rotation to a secure location keeps mission-critical data safe while maintaining compliance with OHSU data retention policies.