Computational Facility

The Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group is a pioneer in the realm of high-performance computing. To meet our computational needs, we maintain a wide selection of computers divided into four main categories: compute power, visualization equipment, desktop workstations, and infrastructure. Additionally, we rely upon a variety of software, and are leading users of the nation's supercomputing resources.

The TCB Group is also dedicated to helping both the biomedical community, and the computational world as a whole, by sharing the knowledge developed while administering the group internally. This knowledge is shared in the user and sysadmin documentation libraries. Addititionally, source code can be found as part of the MDTools library.

Computational Facility Spotlights
Spotlight - System Security
System Security
While many research groups choose to work behind a firewall, the Resource has chosen to stay open to the world and instead focus on making sure each system on the network is well-defended. Generally, the only service open on a given system is SSH, for remote access. User passwords never go over the network in the clear, where they could be intercepted; instead, all relevant connections are encrypted using SSL or similar technologies (IMAP/S, SSH, SFTP, etc), and the only unencrypted traffic is web, mail, and other unauthenticated traffic (and even these protocols offer SSL capabilities). Systems and services which cannot be fully secured are TCP wrapped, to remove access from unapproved systems. New systems are scanned to ensure that no unauthorized ports are open. Our system administration team generally patches holes in our open services within six hours of their discovery. Windows systems are patched nightly with SUS.

All Spotlights