Support and Maintenance

FAQ

Getting Help

Your first line of support is this Wiki. Please check out the FAQs or the Search feature to see if your issue has been addressed.

You can also contact your POD BRCF delegate. These folks are listed in the table at POD Resources and Access: Available PODs.

Contact Us

Please email us at rctf-support@utexas.edu.

Directing your support request to rctf-support@utexas.edu is preferred to contacting someone associated with BRCF you know directly. Our support email is monitored by all BRCF support personnel, while any person you contact directly may not be readily available, or may not be familiar with the subject of your support request.

Monthly Maintenance

Regular maintenance is performed on all BRCF PODs monthly, generally on a Tuesday in the 2nd half of the month. The standard window is 8 am - 6 pm, but is often shorter than than and can occasionally be extended if issues are encountered. Email notifications are sent out prior to each maintenance and the day of.

Access to POD servers is unavailable during maintenance, and any running jobs will be terminated. This is because regular maintenance includes applying OS updates and may also include configuring, upgrading or replacing various hardware components, both of which require restarting POD servers.

Please make plans for any long-running compute jobs based on this maintenance schedule. If, however, you have an urgent need to complete work that conflicts with regular maintenance, please Contact Us, and we will try to adjust maintenance for your POD accordingly, if possible

Our Team

Our small but mighty team consists of staff from the Center for Biomedical Research Support (CBRS), home of the BRCF core facility, as well as systems administrators from the College of Natural Sciences Office of Information Technology (CNS-OIT). Note that none of us is assigned 100% to BRCF.

Anna Battenhouse BRCF Manager Bioinformatics Consulting Group & Edward Marcotte lab member MBB 3.106	Sean Provost Systems Administrator BRCF MBB 3.106	Marci Coleman Senior Systems Administrator BRCF MBB 3.106
Eric Rostetter Senior Systems Administrator Server Systems manager CNS-OIT PMA 7.126	Carlos Villarreal Systems Administrator CNS-OIT PMA 7.125	Maorong Zou Senior Systems Administrator CNS-OIT PMA 8.132

About Anna

Anna has taken a different route to UT biocomputing.

Her Timeline:

1978: BA English Literature, Carleton College, Northfield MN
1982 - 2006: Professional Software Engineer
2007 - Present: "Retirement career" - Biocomputing and Bioinformatics roles at UT Austin
2013: BS Biochemistry, The University of Texas at Austin

Her Roles:

Associate Research Scientist, Edward Marcotte lab
Manager, Biomedical Research Support Facility (BRCF) - https://cloud.wikis.utexas.edu/wiki/spaces/RCTFusers
Member, Bioinformatics Consulting Group (BCG) - https://site.research.utexas.edu/cbrs/cores/cbb/bioinformatics-services/
Workshop instructor, Center for Biomedical Research Support (CBRS) - https://site.research.utexas.edu/cbrs/classes/

With a degree in English literature, Anna started out working in publishing, but became quickly discouraged by publishing's 80/20 rule: women do 80% of the work and make 20% of the $$. So she started taking Math and C.S. classes at UT and managed to get a summer internship on the customer support line at Texas Instruments (TI). That was it – she had found her tribe!

After a long career in professional software development at TI, Motorola, and other companies, Anna began her “retirement career” at UT Austin in 2007 in the Functional Genomics lab of Vishwanath Iyer, co-inventor of Microarray technology. At that time Dr. Iyer was one of the first UT researchers to experiment with high-throughput Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS). Anna was fortunate to be part of the first wave in this then-new technology and has acquired extensive experience in NGS over the years.

Anna also helped found, and now manages, the Biomedical Research Support Facility (BRCF), where her role requires a unique combination of skills in systems administration, programming, project management, problem troubleshooting, and customer communication, as well as bioinformatics/biology knowledge.

Today Anna also assists Marcotte lab members with NGS analysis, performs fee-based bioinformatics analyses for UT researchers in UT’s Bioinformatics Consulting Group, and teaches a number of workshops on NGS and other topics for training offerings in the Center for Biomedical Research Support (CBRS).

In her (limited) free time, Anna loves to read widely (especially history), travel with her husband John Kolts, play contract bridge, and take walks with their beloved Shih Tzu, Lola.