Technology Facilities and Resources,

The Office of Innovative Technologies (OIT) provides the University of Tennessee with enterprise-level technology services. By relying on OIT to maintain the network, hardware, security environment, system administration, and software, researchers are free to devote their time to science and research.

Resources for the university community include software for office productivity, collaboration, instruction and research, secure computing facilities, identity management, secure data centers, system administration, email, artificial intelligence, student information system, and more. 

OIT manages a complex network that spans the campus and remote sites throughout the state and connects UTK to research facilities at Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL) and Internet2. Network services include the local UTK network (both wired and wireless), multiple wide-area connections, Internet/Internet2 connectivity, and network security devices. The UTK network supports speeds of 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) and greater. Most buildings are dual-connected with 10 Gbps links to the core to support applications that have high bandwidth requirements.

OIT provides secure data centers, virtual servers, and system administration. This team also provides email, collaboration, and file storage environments for Microsoft 365 and T-Storage, the campus-hosted file sharing solution. Microsoft 365 can be used to host institution data, including FERPA-protected information, Protected Health Information, or other materials and information covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. 

OIT provides cloud services, including Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), to support innovative research, academic programs, and administrative operations.

OIT provides software to the UT community at no additional charge.  Many packages are available to download to university and personally owned computers and through Apps@UT, a virtual environment allowing faculty, staff, and students to run research software as if it were installed on the individual’s own computer.  Cloud offerings include Microsoft Office, Qualtrics, ArcGIS Online, and more.

OIT offers a stable, available, and reliable computer lab environment for students to complete their academic assignments. We offer full technical and logistical management of OIT public labs as well as support for many academic departments. We offer students and faculty easy access to Windows and Mac computers, printers, and a wide range of software applications. There is also the ability to reserve specific classrooms for computer classes.

UTK OIT Research Services 

OIT provides a variety of research support to the campus community. The Research Computing Support (RCS) team within OIT has been developed to assist students, faculty, and staff with enhancing the quality of their research. RCS is staffed with full-time, experienced expert statisticians who assist with the planning and application of a wide variety of analytical methods for both quantitative, qualitative, and geographic information system research. Areas of support include statistical consulting, machine learning, research planning and power analysis, computing, software support, coding, analysis, and interpretation as well as data visualization and help with editing or writing methods and results sections. The RCS team has co-authored over 370 manuscripts alongside university faculty. Additional areas of support include data science, artificial intelligence, text analysis, geospatial data analytics, and mapping. Faculty members are entitled to 50 hours of consultation each year at no additional charge. Faculty and students have access to analysis software such as ArcGIS, MATLAB, NVivo, Python, Qualtrics, SAS, SPSS, Stata, and R.  

The Office of Innovative Technologies’ High Performance and Scientific Computing (HPSC) group provides high-end research compute resources and services to the university community, including both open and secure computing enclaves for high-performance work. The current cluster contains 389 compute nodes, 36 GPU nodes, 22,768 cores and 15.3 petabytes of raw storage as of July 2025. The open enclave is seamlessly available to all UTK faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate research students. The secure enclave supports research on a variety of computing platforms with controls to meet Protected Health Information and Controlled Unclassified Information standards. Support for using these resources includes system administration, scientific computing, documentation, training, software installation and maintenance, and other support services. Additional services include support for grant writing, bioinformatics consulting services, and data science research consulting for the HPC environment.

In partnership with the AI Tennessee Initiative, HPSC provides high-performance Dell PowerEdge servers with NVIDIA H100 GPUs in the open enclave cluster for AI-related research. These resources are available by request for University of Tennessee, Knoxville, faculty-led projects and are integrated into the open enclave environment.

Last updated August 2025