Michigan Neuroimaging Initiative

University of Michigan computing clusters

There are two clusters available for general use at the University of Michigan. One is called Flux, and it is for data that is fully deidentified and has no restrictive data use agreement, the other is called Armis, and it is approved for use with data that falls under HIPAA regulation. Both are operated by ARC-TS, and faculty, staff, and students can get access to them.

Flux has large-memory (up to 1.5 TB RAM) and GPU nodes. Flux is a for-fee service, and two fee models are available for the standard Flux, monthly subscription and per-CPU second. Flux is a good resource for medium- to large-scale tasks where computations per task take more than an hour. Some neuroimaging software is preinstalled on Flux, e.g., FSL, FreeSurfer, and others can be installed.

The GPU resources on Flux can speed up processing of DTI data using the FSL programs bedpostx and probtrackx, which can result in processing an order or two of magnitude faster (minutes instead of days).

Armis has been used to process both Human Connectome and ABCD data.

People in LSA can use the LSA public allocation at no cost to themself or to their lab.

Please send mail to michigan-nii-help@umich.edu if you have questions about the clusters, how to get started, etc.