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.
Learn moreA 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.
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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
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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.
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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.
Read our mission statementCollaborating with industry-leading organizations
RENCI’s expertise in leading and coordinating large and complex team science projects is recognized at the national scale, and our growing outreach and engagement expertise has landed us funding on multiple new federal projects. Though we have well-established and recognized expertise in many domain-specific areas, we know that our potential for success and impact on society is far greater when we combine our expertise and resources with other teams, and we strive to continuously and intentionally embody the spirit of collaboration.
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Featured Projects
RAPID: Collaborative Research: Building Digital Infrastructure and Communities to Assess Risk of Drinking Water Hazards Caused by Hurricanes
The goal of this project is to facilitate increased access to post-hurricane water quality data through access to cyberinfrastructure, capacity development and community-building among relevant groups concerned with post-disaster water quality issues. The project featured a number of activities such as accelerating research through network-to-network collaborations, data needs and availability assessment, data collection, and educational activities focused on data curation and cyberinfrastructure. This project grew out of prior work related to Hurricane Maria and was initiated after Hurricane Florence. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the original goal to conduct two face-to-face workshops was replaced with a joint virtual three-session workshop which took place during late May and early June 2021. The content for the workshop is available in a publicly accessible GitHub repository and is available for re-use, or to make a copy to customize for additional contexts.
South Big Data Hub (SBDH)
The South Big Data Regional Innovation Hub (South Hub) is one of four Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs established in 2015 by the NSF. Run jointly by Georgia Tech and RENCI, the South Hub builds public-private partnerships to address data science challenges specific to the US South.
Coastal Probabilistic Hazard Analysis (FEMA-BOA)
FEMA has recently conducted new coastal hazard and risk studies to support the mission and goals of the National Flood Insurance Program with new flood maps. These studies are costly and generate large volumes of model-generated data that capture the range of hurricane impacts for a region. The ADCIRC model has been used for all recent FEMA studies of this nature. Beyond the immediate use for mapping activities, these collections of model results can be used for other applications. The key to leveraging these data is to develop “surrogate models” that statistically represent the underlying model dynamics as best as possible, thus allowing for rapid statistical simulations of unmodeled events. This project will implement various surrogate modeling approaches using the flood insurance study for FEMA’s Region 3 (NC/VA border through the Delaware coast), which RENCI conducted. These data include time and spatially varying simulated waves, water levels, wind, atmospheric pressure, and currents, among other variables. These data could be useful for other efforts if they were more easily discoverable and accessible. The surrogate models will be developed and implemented by collaborators at the University of Notre Dame. RENCI will define and implement the needed cyberinfrastructure to make the data externally accessible through a geospatial database. The methods and approach will subsequently be used to develop similar databases for other regional FEMA coastal study datasets.
BioData Catalyst
NHLBI BioData Catalyst is a cloud-based ecosystem providing tools, applications, and workflows in secure workspaces. By increasing access to NHLBI datasets and data analysis capabilities, BioData Catalyst accelerates biomedical research that drives discovery, leading to novel diagnostic tools, therapeutics and prevention strategies for heart, lung, blood, and sleep disorders.
Obesity Hub
A winner of the UNC Vice Chancellor for Research’s Creativity Hubs Initiative, “Heterogeneity in Obesity: Transdisciplinary Approaches for Precision Research and Treatment” is focused on understanding why two people who consume the same diets and exercise equally can have very different susceptibility to weight gain, with the aim of developing treatment approaches that go far beyond the “one-size-fits-all” approach that is so common. The Obesity Hub is a large collaborative project with 27 faculty from 16 departments, six schools, and five centers and institutes.
An Intelligent Concept Agent for Assisting with the Application of Metadata (INCA)
The goal of INCA (An Intelligent Concept Agent for Assisting with the Application of Metadata) is to develop an intelligent concept assistant that will allow researchers to generate and share sets of metadata elements relevant to their project and will use machine learning techniques to automatically apply this to data. The agent is based around a personalized dashboard of metadata elements that can be collected from multiple specialized portals, as well as sites such as Wikipedia. These elements can be coupled with classifiers that can be used to self-identify datasets to which they may be relevant, making the selection of appropriate vocabularies easier for researchers.
FABRIC
FABRIC is a unique national research infrastructure to enable cutting-edge and exploratory research at-scale in networking, cybersecurity, distributed computing and storage systems, machine learning, and science applications. It is an everywhere programmable nationwide instrument comprised of novel extensible network elements equipped with large amounts of compute and storage, interconnected by high speed, dedicated optical links. It will connect a number of specialized testbeds (5G/IoT PAWR, NSF Clouds) and high-performance computing facilities to create a rich fabric for a wide variety of experimental activities.
Shoring up the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem through Real-Time Data Analysis
This project addressed the need for an alternative approach to firm level data collection using digital sources to inform decision making in support of entrepreneurial development. Our main objective was to provide data to entrepreneurial support agencies and organizations, enabling them to make better informed, more expedient decisions in support of innovation and firm development. These organizations would benefit not only from systematic access to real-time data sources, but equally from the ability to match and reconcile multiple data sources in support of firm level analysis. Entrepreneurial data of this nature has the potential to transform economic development analytics and guide policy towards building more resilient entrepreneurial communities.
ROBOKOP U24
The volume of biomedical research data stored in various databases has grown immensely in recent years due to the proliferation of high-throughput biomedical ‘-omics’ technologies. Nearly all of respective databases, or ‘knowledge sources’ (KSs), address a particular area of biomedical research, leading to natural diversity but also growing disintegration between individual KSs, which generates downstream inefficiencies when mining diverse databases for knowledge discovery. Austin and colleagues described this situation as the ‘Translational Tower of Babel’ [1]. Yet, in the age of team science and cross-disciplinary research, translational research questions often require co-exploration of multiple FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable)-compliant [2] KSs that must be connected and integrated to deconstruct the tower and identify answers and solutions. Expanding efforts, both in academia and industry, are focused on the development of methods and tools to enable semantic integration and concurrent exploration of disparate biomedical KSs, using specially constructed biomedical ‘graph knowledgebases’ (GKBs) that support the generation of new knowledge through the application of reasoning tools and algorithms. Our team has contributed to these efforts by initiating the development of a GKB-based question-answering system termed Reasoning Over Biomedical Objects linked in Knowledge-Oriented Pathways (ROBOKOP) [3], [4]. ROBOKOP’s publicly accessible user interface (UI) [5] allows users to address both relatively simple questions such as “what genes are associated with drug-induced liver injury?” and more complex ones such as “what drugs could be used to treat airborne pollutant–induced asthma exacerbations in patients who are non-responsive to traditional medications?”
AERPAW
Aerial Experimentation Research Platform for Advanced Wireless AERPAW is a $24 million grant awarded by the National Science Foundation to develop an advanced wireless research platform, led by North Carolina State University, in partnership with Wireless Research Center of North Carolina, Mississippi State University and Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; additional partners include Town of Cary, City of Raleigh, North Carolina Department of Transportation, Purdue University, University of South Carolina, and many other academic, industry and municipal partners. AERPAW, the nation’s first aerial wireless experimentation platform spanning 5G technologies and beyond, will enable cutting-edge research — with the potential to create transformative wireless advances for aerial systems.
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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