START Recommendation Implementation

Recommendation Implementation

The following START recommendations have completed the recommendation review process, including the Request for Consultation process by the Academic Senate, review by the Academic Federation and Staff Assembly, and email distribution to all faculty and staff for review and input. Feedback was compiled and thoughtfully reviewed by Provost Croughan, who has determined the requests will move forward for implementation.

The Assuring Faculty Equity and a Sustainable Workload Committee:

Coming soon

The Future of Graduate Education Committee:

Career Development - Davis Division of the Academic Senate RFC Combined Response

The Future of Undergraduate Education Committee:

The Increasing Our Research Excellence Committee:

Campus Research CORES - Davis Division of the Academic Senate RFC Combined Response
Supporting documents: CORES Facility Report, CORES Evaluation Rubric, CORES Sample MOU
Centralized Funding for High-Performance Computing Core Facility - Davis Division of the Academic Senate RFC Combined Response
Supporting documents: Appendix 1 - Strategic Draft, Appendix 2 - Five-Year Plan
Research Computing Oversight - Davis Division of the Academic Senate RFC Combined Response
High Performance Computing Research Infrastructure Modernization - Davis Division of the Academic Senate RFC Combined Response
Supporting documents: Appendix 1 - Return on Investment in Research Cyberinfrastructure, Appendix 2 - Use of Funds FY 2022-28, Appendix 3 - Detailed Breakdown of Expenses
Background on the above recommendation: The fourth recommendation from the Increasing Our Research Excellence Committee builds on two previous recommendations related to High Performance Computing (HPC), work that is done at UC Davis by the HPC Core Facility, also known as HPC@UCD. While the committee’s first two HPC-related recommendations focused on research computing and staffing issues, the third recommendation is more comprehensive and includes long-term staffing, equipment, and operations.

The HPC@UCD is a specialized facility designed for computational research. It provides advanced computing power to support complex simulations, modeling, and data analysis. On university campuses, HPC facilities, which primarily serve faculty, graduate students, and post-docs, require significantly higher power densities than a traditional data center, particularly for graphics processing unit-intensive workloads used in AI, physics, and bioinformatics research.

HPC@UCD is staffed by nine individuals who support nearly 1,800 researchers in more than 20 departments across several colleges at UC Davis. The campus’s current HPC environment consists of more than 50,000 CPU cores, 239 GPUs, and 25 petabytes of data storage. For reference, one petabyte is the equivalent of 1,000 terabytes, or more than 1 million gigabytes.