The Futureverse project, led by DEB faculty member Henrik Bengtsson, recently celebrated its ten-year anniversary, marking a decade of helping researchers speed up their data analysis without needing to become computer experts. With over 400,000 downloads per month, it has become a trusted standard in the scientific community and industry, allowing you to focus on your results rather than complex computer settings. The newly released futurize tool makes this even easier: it allows you to take existing analysis R code you run on your notebook and instantly scale it up on multiple desktops to powerful systems like UCSF Wynton and the new UCSF CoreHPC. There is no need to rewrite your code or learn how to manage servers; it simply works, letting you get answers faster.
Looking ahead, the project is working to make accessing even larger resources, such as the UC-wide HPC@UC and the National Research Platform, just as automatic and effortless. Henrik also presented parallel work on worldwide peer-to-peer computing at the international useR! 2025 conference, an initiative aiming to democratize computation and level the playing field by allowing scientists to securely pool available computing power from different locations. By running in strictly isolated, secure "sandboxes," this technology not only helps researchers with fewer resources scale up their work but also opens the door for federated AI learning.
For further assistance with scaling up your analysis, or tailored training, researchers are encouraged to reach out to the UCSF Scientific Software Core.