Business IT Lab (BitLab)

Business IT Lab has evolved from a unit that primarily supported teaching—by demonstrating business-related analytical and reporting tools—to one that also supports researchers at the School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg. Today, BitLab provides both advice and computing resources to researchers. 

In addition, BitLab acts as a liaison between the school’s faculty and the university’s central IT services, keeping track of new tools, services, and centrally provided resources. Since 2023, BitLab has offered expertise and computing power for intensive computational tasks, as well as access to local language models for large-scale research use.

Research support

At present, BitLab offers researchers access to two high-performance servers for working with large datasets, computationally intensive tasks, and training machine learning models. In addition, BitLab operates two powerful servers dedicated to large-scale analysis using large language models, with flexible access provided through internal APIs. All machines are hosted locally and support responsible handling of research data, including projects that involve more complex or sensitive information. The infrastructure is designed to be flexible and adaptable, providing researchers with advanced computational resources as their needs evolve. 

The server farm

Bitlab runs a virtual cluster on a server farm that acts as a hub for education.

The server farm consists of servers running Microsoft Hyper-V that can virtualize multiple installations on the same cluster, for example ERP-systems that can handle a large amount of students.

The installations have accounts and configured datasets that are suited for exercises for member universities in SANTE Academy. In these installations students, teachers and researchers can test out the systems and work freely.

It is also possible to build specialized IT-solutions in the virtual cluster.