Enabling research is at the center of RCDC’s mission. The center has helped enable the advancement of critical inquiry in many fields—from the physical sciences to the social sciences to the humanities. In addition to the cutting-edge hardware and the advanced software that RCDC maintains, our expert staff—computational scientists, research programmers, and HPC systems administrators—assist research projects through support, consultation, and training to help effectively implement our hardware, software, and visualization resources.

The Houston metropolitan area is world headquarters for the energy industry and home to the Texas Medical Center, the largest medical complex in the world. Accordingly, the University’s two main research priorities are energy and health. HPC needs in these areas range broadly from traditional supercomputing to extraction of information from large-scale databases.

Many research activities at UH rely on high performance computing (HPC) for large-scale data processing or visualization, including climate and air quality modeling, virtual reality, cybersecurity, quantum chemistry, particle and space physics, biophysics, and nanomaterials. Beyond the traditional STEM disciplines, UH researchers actively apply HPC methods in the digital humanities, political analysis, and econometrics.