Computer Facilities

CHM’s computing environment consists of roughly 100 managed desktops and laptops contained on the University of Wisconsin – Madison’s centralized active directory and mobile device management backbone. The Campus Active Directory Service provides a centralized Active Directory instance for the University of Wisconsin - Madison campus, with individual control per department. The backbone resources are housed in UW-Madison's Department of Information Technology (DoIT) data center, which is a climate-controlled, secure, HIPAA-compliant facility. Our mobile device management backbone is a local UW-Madison instance of VMWare's Workspace One, which is also housed at DoIT's facility. 

Data storage for studies, groups, and personal user data are hosted on DoIT's shared, research, and restricted drive services. The backbone storage devices are housed in the same DoIT data center, and is securely encrypted with end-to-end encryption via SMBv3 encryption and encryption at rest technology. The data is continuously backed up via DoIT's Bucky Backup services, which offer snapshot retrieval of data as well as on-and-off-site redundant storage.

We operate several virtual windows and linux servers to facilitate remote desktop work, systems management, study data facilitation, and so forth. These are hosted on DoIT's Campus Cloud Infrastructure (CCI) service which delivers secure and scalable virtual infrastructure hosted in DoIT's secure, HIPAA-compliant data center.

Some studies utilize the Waisman Brain Imaging Core and UW-Madison Center for High Throughput Computing CONDOR clusters for high throughput computing work. We provide standard productivity software (Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc.) as well as a number of programming languages, data analysis software, and more. Commonly used specialized software includes Python, PsychoPy, R, and R Studio.