Pioneering the future of computing research
The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) is a research institute at UNC-Chapel Hill that focuses on data science for the greater good. We are a team of innovators, problem-solvers, and forward-thinking individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds, skill sets, and perspectives coming together to conduct groundbreaking research and enact positive change at the local, state, national, and international levels. Explore our various projects, research groups, collaborations, and operations teams to learn more about our work and the people who make it happen.
About RENCIA core project within the Department of Homeland Security’s Coastal Resilience Center at UNC-Chapel Hill, APSViz disseminates real-time coastal hazards information and enhances research productivity by making it much easier to understand computer simulations and predictions of coastal hazards. Learn more about APSViz.
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NC researchers come together to harness...
In an increasingly interconnected world, the integration of clinical and environmental health data holds immense potential for advancing research, improving patient outcomes, and shaping the future of healthcare. However, to truly make an impact on individuals and communities, institutional and scientific silos that hinder collaboration and resource
Blog
Coastal Hazard and Risk Modeling - Evacuation Modeling
To save lives, it is critical to know the best way to protect people in the path of a hurricane. While emergency managers use models to inform evacuation routes and timing, existing models are based primarily on “clearance time,” or ensuring that evacuees are on the roads for the shortest amount of time. The models do not take into account what populations are at most at risk, potential for injury or loss of life, or other social factors.
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ImPACT
Scientific progress today requires multi-institutional and cross-disciplinary sharing and analysis of data. Many disciplines, such as social and health-related sciences, face a web of policies and technological constraints on data due to privacy concerns over, for example, Personal Health Information (PHI) or Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Issues of privacy, safety, competition, and ownership have led to regulations controlling data location, availability, movement, and access. Compliance poses obstacles to traditional data-processing practices and slows research; yet, increasingly, pressing scientific and societal problems demand collaborative efforts involving data from multiple stakeholders.
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Data Matters short-course series returns in August 2023
Now in its tenth year, Data Matters, a week-long series of one and two-day courses aimed at students and professionals in business, research, and government, will take place August 7 – 11, 2023 virtually via Zoom. This short course series is sponsored by the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at UNC-Chapel Hill, the National Consortium for Data Science, and RENCI.
Learn moreNews
NC researchers come together to harness...
In an increasingly interconnected world, the integration of clinical and environmental health data holds immense potential for advancing research, improving patient outcomes, and shaping the future of healthcare. However, to truly make an impact on individuals and communities, institutional and scientific silos that hinder collaboration and resource
Blog
Coastal Hazard and Risk Modeling - Evacuation Modeling
To save lives, it is critical to know the best way to protect people in the path of a hurricane. While emergency managers use models to inform evacuation routes and timing, existing models are based primarily on “clearance time,” or ensuring that evacuees are on the roads for the shortest amount of time. The models do not take into account what populations are at most at risk, potential for injury or loss of life, or other social factors.
Learn moreProjects
ImPACT
Scientific progress today requires multi-institutional and cross-disciplinary sharing and analysis of data. Many disciplines, such as social and health-related sciences, face a web of policies and technological constraints on data due to privacy concerns over, for example, Personal Health Information (PHI) or Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Issues of privacy, safety, competition, and ownership have led to regulations controlling data location, availability, movement, and access. Compliance poses obstacles to traditional data-processing practices and slows research; yet, increasingly, pressing scientific and societal problems demand collaborative efforts involving data from multiple stakeholders.
Learn moreNews
Data Matters short-course series returns in August 2023
Now in its tenth year, Data Matters, a week-long series of one and two-day courses aimed at students and professionals in business, research, and government, will take place August 7 – 11, 2023 virtually via Zoom. This short course series is sponsored by the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at UNC-Chapel Hill, the National Consortium for Data Science, and RENCI.
Learn more
Leading innovation in diverse research fields
RENCI supports several research groups; centered around data science, each domain-specific group offers scientific and technical expertise to advance discovery within their field.
Clinical Informatics
Enhancing health sciences research and clinical practice through advanced data management and analysis, improving patient diagnoses and treatment outcomes. Learn more.
Data Science and Analytics
Transforming sectors like science and industry with big data tools and technologies for improved data access, sharing, analysis, and long-term archiving. Learn more.
Earth Data Science
Utilizing data management, high-performance computing, and visualization to model coastal impacts and support environmental data sharing and sustainability. Learn more.
Network Research and Infrastructure
Advancing high-performance computing and networking to facilitate seamless data access, sharing, and storage for global scientific collaboration Learn more.
Software Architecture
Creating scalable cloud computing data science platforms featuring full-text search, knowledge graphs and machine learning models. Learn more.
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20+ years of excellence
Founded in 2004, RENCI has demonstrated experience and driven innovation across a variety of projects and domains.
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Featured projects
Galapagos Science Center
The Galapagos Science Center, a state-of-the-art research facility in the Galapagos Islands, was established in 2008 by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Ecuador’s Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) to promote science and education to protect the island’s unique ecosystems.
North Carolina Renewable Ocean Energy Program (NCROEP)
The goals of the program include: Advance interdisciplinary research & collaboration to bring new ocean energy technologies to the clean energy market. Promote testing & validation to improve efficiency, reliability, & reduce the operation and maintenance costs of ocean energy solutions. Inspire innovation, stewardship, and Blue Economy development through public & academic engagement. Lead holistic environmental assessments for the development of regulatory guidelines for responsible ocean energy advancement
Bias Tracking and Reduction Methods for High-Dimensional Exploratory Visual Analysis and Selection
Exploratory visualization and analysis of large and complex datasets is growing increasingly common across a range of domains, and large and complex data repositories are being created with the goal supporting data-driven, evidence-based decision making. However, today's visualization tools are often overwhelmed when applied to high-dimensional datasets (i.e., datasets with large numbers of variables). Real-world datasets can often have many thousands of variables; a stark contrast to the much smaller number of dimensions supported by most visualizations. This gap in dimensionality puts the validity of any analysis at great risk of bias, potentially leading to serious, hidden errors. This research project developed a new approach to high-dimensional exploratory visualization that will help detect and reduce selection bias and other problems with data interpretation during exploratory high-dimensional data visualization. The project's results, including open-source software, are broadly applicable across domains, and have been evaluated with users in a health outcomes research setting. This offers significant potential to improve health care around the world.
Preservice Educators Reimagining Core Experiences in Physics Teaching (PERCEPT)
PERCEPT builds upon an educational innovation—haptically-enabled science simulations (HESSs)—and seeks to extend theory to explain their impact on a persistent challenge in STEM education: elementary school teachers’ lack of comfort with and avoidance of core/fundamental physics concepts, including forces. Research has shown that elementary school teachers do not have a firm grasp of what forces are and struggle to reason about foundational physics concepts such as using the idea of forces as interactions. These ideas are "stepping stone" concepts for much of physics learning and a disciplinary core idea in the Next Generation Science Standards. PERCEPT attends to the interfaces between teaching and learning and the mediation of STEM learning through iterative use-inspired research to provide foundational knowledge for a new model of teaching and learning core physics concepts using haptic force-feedback devices combined with state-of-the-art game engine software.
Coastal Hazards and Risk Research: Applications of the ADCIRC Storm Surge and Wind-wave Model
RENCI collaborates with Rick Luettich, director of the Institute of Marine Sciences and the DHS-funded Coastal Resilience Center, to support, advance, and extend research and applications of the ADCIRC storm surge and wind-wave model. Applications include probabilistic forecasting of storm surge levels during hurricanes, using AI and machine learning methods to simulate and predict hurricane tracks, and performance analysis and code tuning of ADCIRC software. ADCIRC is the core computational model in the ADCIRC Surge Guidance System (ASGS), a real-time software system that computes high-resolution coastal flooding predictions during tropical storms and hurricanes. The work was awarded a 2012 DHS Impact Award, a 2013 HPC Innovation Excellence Award, and a 2016 HPC Impact Award at the SC16 conference. ADCIRC users include the U.S. Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA, and NOAA, several consulting firms, and hundreds of academic researchers worldwide.
FlyNet: An 'On-the-fly' Deeply Programmable End-to-end Network-Centric Platform for Edge-to-Core Workflows
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (also known as drones) are becoming popular in the sky. The safe, efficient, and economic operation of such drones poses a variety of challenges that have to be addressed by the science community. This project will provide tools that will allow researchers and drone application developers to address operational drone challenges by using advanced computer and network technologies. FlyNet will provide an architecture and tools that will enable scientists to include edge computing devices in their computational workflows. This capability is critical for low latency and ultra-low latency applications like drone video analytics and route planning for drones. The proposed work will include four major tasks. First, cutting edge network and compute infrastructure will be integrated into the overall architecture to make them available as part of scientific workflows. Second, in-network processing at the network edge and core will be made available through new programming abstractions. Third, enhanced end-to-end monitoring capabilities will be offered. Finally, the architecture will leverage the Pegasus Workflow Management System to integrate in-network and edge processing capabilities. Providing best practices and tools that enable the use of advanced cyberinfrastructure for scientific workflows will have a broad impact on society in the long term. The project team will enable access to a rich set of resources for researchers and educators from a diverse set of institutions to further democratize research. In addition, collaboration with the NSF REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) Site in Consumer Networking will promote participation of under-served/under-represented students in project activities.
Coastal Hazard and Risk Modeling - Evacuation Modeling
To save lives, it is critical to know the best way to protect people in the path of a hurricane. While emergency managers use models to inform evacuation routes and timing, existing models are based primarily on “clearance time,” or ensuring that evacuees are on the roads for the shortest amount of time. The models do not take into account what populations are at most at risk, potential for injury or loss of life, or other social factors. The storm surge and wave model ADCIRC forms the basis of a new comprehensive tropical cyclone impacts modeling system that integrates coastal oceanographic processes with mesoscale meteorological and hydrological processes to model water levels, winds, precipitation, and river drainage during emergency events. This comprehensive approach to modeling the hurricane-related hazards and uncertainties is then used in a state-of-the-art evacuation and sheltering model that optimizes for the aggregate risk to a coastal population, instead of only minimizing clearance times. The models are computed on RENCI supercomputers.
Coastal Hazards, Equity, Economic prosperity and Resilience (CHEER) Hub
The Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware has been awarded $16.5 million from the National Science Foundation to lead a multi-institutional effort exploring the tension and tradeoffs between a community’s goals of managing hurricane risk while also achieving equity and economic prosperity. The UD-led hub — Coastal Hazards, Equity, Economic prosperity and Resilience (CHEER) — is one of five NSF-funded projects announced recently as part of the agency’s Coastlines and People program, which is infusing $51 million in research funding to protect the natural, social and economic resources of U.S. coasts, and to help create more resilient coastal communities. R
DataBridge
DataBridge, a collaboration between RENCI and the School of Information and Library Science, develops tools and methods to extract and use knowledge from the millions of data sets created by thousands of scientists worldwide. The ability to discover and use these data sets across disciplines is one way to accelerate progress in science and engineering. DataBridge works as an interface similar to social networking sites that show relationships among data points and enables access to a wide range of research databases and links to data sets. Funded by the NSF, DataBridge received additional NSF support to build a DataBridge for neuroscience research under the title, “EAGER: Data Bridge for Neuroscience.”
Center for Cancer Data Harmonization (CCDH)
The Center for Cancer Data Harmonization aimed to make the volumes of data arising from cancer research more accessible, organized, and powerful. CCDH worked with the National Cancer Institute's cloud-based data-sharing portal called the Cancer Research Data Commons. In the Commons, the goal is for disparate types of data generated by everything from basic science studies to clinical trials to be integrated and structured in ways that help researchers make advances and clinicians provide the best treatments. The center's work was organized around five key areas: community development, data model harmonization, ontology and terminology ecosystem, tools and data quality, and program management. RENCI contributed expertise in incorporating ontologies into tools for data validation, harmonization, and quality control.
Recent articles
NC researchers reconvene for second Clinical and Environmental Health Data workshop
On Friday, February 23, 2024, RENCI hosted the second workshop in a series on Clinical and Environmental Health Data, themed “Integrating Exposures Data into Clinical Data Assets: Building a Regional Center of Excellence.” The inaugural workshop, themed “Clinical and Environmental Health Data Workshop Series – Exploration,” was also hosted by RENCI in May 2023. The workshop series is being jointly led by experts in clinical and environmental health data and cyberinfrastructure at RENCI, US EPA,
UNC Advances Hurricane-driven Flood Prediction Capabilities for Coastal Communities
On September 14, 2018, Hurricane Florence made landfall in the Wrightsville Beach area of coastal North Carolina. While the storm was a category 1, it caused catastrophic flooding throughout much of the state. The record amount of rain from the system combined with an already saturated soil. Rivers overflowed their banks, storm surge inundated coastal areas, and the water had nowhere to go. It was a rare compound flooding scenario that will be studied and remembered for a long time. It is diffi
IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center joins the iRODS Consortium
IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center at VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, which is based in the Czech Republic, has become the newest member of the iRODS Consortium. The consortium brings together businesses, research organizations, universities, and government agencies from around the world to ensure the sustainability of the iRODS software as a solution for distributed storage, transfer, and management of data. Members work with the consortium to guide further development and inn
Exploring the power of distributed intelligence for resilient scientific workflows
Future computational workflows will span distributed research infrastructures that include multiple instruments, resources, and facilities to support and accelerate scientific discovery. However, the diversity and distributed nature of these resources makes harnessing their full potential difficult. To address this challenge, a team of researchers from the University of Southern California (USC), the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina, and Oak Ridge, Lawr
RENCI to showcase latest technological innovations at SC23
Every sector of society is undergoing a historic transformation driven by big data. RENCI is committed to transforming data into discoveries by partnering with leading universities, government, and the private sector to create tools and technologies that facilitate data access, sharing, analysis, management, and archiving. Each year, the Supercomputing conference provides the leading technical program for professionals and students in the HPC community, as measured by impact, at the highest aca
RENCI awarded NSF grant to develop cyberinfrastructure training program for X-ray scientists
RENCI scientists and collaborators from Cornell University and University of Southern California (USC) have been awarded a $1 million, three-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop an innovative training program for scientists who use the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) X-ray facility. The program will be designed to help the scientists increase their computing skills, awareness and literacy with an ultimate goal of accelerating scientific innovations in s
NSF FABRIC project announces groundbreaking high-speed network infrastructure expansion
The NSF-funded FABRIC project has completed installation of a unique network infrastructure connection, called the TeraCore—a ring spanning the continental U.S.—which boasts data transmission speeds of 1.2 Terabits per second (Tbps), or one trillion bits per second. FABRIC previously established preeminence with its cross-continental infrastructure, but the project has now hit another milestone as the only testbed capable of transmitting data at these speeds—the highest being twelve times faster
ChatGPT used to streamline medical record analysis in EduHeLx
In the past few months, ChatGPT has risen from relative obscurity to a newsworthy technology for its revolutionary artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. The natural language processing chatbot was developed by OpenAI and is built on top of families of large language models. This approach enables ChatGPT to return related search results by reasoning over interconnected knowledge networks across these language models, rendering it the most advanced AI chatbot to date. ChatGPT’s innovative AI
Data Matters short-course series returns in August 2023
Now in its tenth year, Data Matters, a week-long series of one and two-day courses aimed at students and professionals in business, research, and government, will take place August 7 – 11, 2023 virtually via Zoom. This short course series is sponsored by the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at UNC-Chapel Hill, the National Consortium for Data Science, and RENCI. In recent years, employers’ expectations for a data literate workforce have grown significantly. According to a 2022 Forr
What to expect at the iRODS 2023 User Group Meeting
The worldwide iRODS community will gather in Chapel Hill, NC from June 13 – 16 Members of the iRODS user community will meet at UNC-Chapel Hill in North Carolina for the 15th Annual iRODS User Group Meeting to participate in four days of learning, sharing use cases, and discussing new capabilities that have been added to iRODS in the last year. The event, sponsored by RENCI, Omnibond, Globus, and Hays, will provide in-person and virtual options for attendance. An audience of over 100 participan
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