IT News

When the University of Arizona Graduate College began exploring ways to better support prospective students, current students, and graduate coordinators, Patrick Barabe approached the topic with caution. As IT Director for the Graduate College, Barabe has spent years evaluating technology solutions and vendor claims. Like many experienced technology leaders, he has learned to approach emerging tools with a healthy degree of skepticism.

Most people interact with University Center for Assessment, Teaching and Technology (UCATT) through a workshop or a Brightspace question. What they may not see is the broader network of support the team provides to instructors and departments throughout the university.

The university’s Research Data Center (RDC) is preparing to install a new HPC cluster in fall 2026. The new system will have 40 nodes of CPU compute, two 8-GPU nodes with H200 GPUs, and one 3TB High-memory node, and will incorporate InfiniBand networking for MPI capabilities. It will be available sometime in the later part of this year.

Chancellor Woolsey grew up in a small Missouri town where he spent his plentiful free time marveling at fictional depictions of the future. He watched computers advance, and in his college years 3D printing, then ChatGPT. Somewhere between Star Wars marathons and a lifelong love of science fiction, he developed a question that would follow him to a PhD program at the University of Arizona: what if the technology we've been dreaming about on screen could actually help people?

Trellis CRM, the University of Arizona's enterprise constituent relationship management program, improves the university constituent experience by helping units make data-informed decisions in their day-to-day workflows. Of the products in the Trellis ecosystem, Trellis Events allows users to easily create and manage free or paid virtual, hybrid, and in-person campus events.

Many people think alumni engagement is only about keeping graduates informed. At the University of Arizona, it’s about building lifelong relationships, and increasingly, technology is helping make those connections more personalized, strategic, and scalable than ever before.

The university’s AI roadmap has reached some significant milestones, shared in a town hall opened by chief AI officer David Ebert. The biggest news is that campus community members now have access to U of A GenAI collection built on AWS Bedrock. This includes the generative AI platforms that can support teaching, learning, research and administrative work. All are private and FERPA compliant, though not HIPAA compliant. 

What is the IT job market going to look like in three years? With the advances in technology, especially Artificial Intelligence, it’s difficult to know, which is especially challenging for students working towards their degrees. Luckily, researchers at the University of Arizona are engaged in numerous important projects, from machine learning to quantum computing to health sciences and health sciences engineering.

When the Compass Assistant and Resource Advisor (CARA) recently went live, it marked more than the launch of another chatbot. It represented something bigger: a growing, campus-wide movement to bring practical, secure, and deeply integrated AI tools into everyday work across the University of Arizona.

Across the University of Arizona’s IT ecosystem, a quiet yet transformative effort is nearing completion, one most campus users will experience firsthand, often with a single click to submit a ServiceNow ticket. Beneath that simplicity lies a complex, months-long effort to integrate dozens of independent systems and workflows into a unified platform.