The Office of Information Technology provides cyberinfrastructure resources and high performance computing capabilities to the Boise State Research community.
OIT also provides support for Research through innovative technical partnerships like the Idaho Optical Regional Network (IRON), the Idaho Computing Consortium, Northwest Knowledge Network, and InCommon.
The Division of Research and Economic Development, in collaboration with OIT, offers virtual servers and storage for Boise State faculty, researchers, colleges, and departments.
These scalable, dependable and affordable virtual servers are available for academic and research use. In addition, OIT has built a dependable enterprise virtual server infrastructure and network attached storage to provide researchers and colleges methods to deploy large scale servers with a predictable cost based on managed and reliable platforms.
The virtual servers are based on Cisco UCS blade server platforms, VMware ESX platform software and NetApp SAN storage. Platforms are built with redundancy and are auto-correcting.
Servers can be designated as managed or unmanaged. With a managed server, system admin services will be shared. On servers designated as unmanaged, system admin services will be the responsibility of the researcher or college.
Max Davis-Johnson talks about recent improvements OIT has made to support research at Boise State University:
Free Servers for Researchers and Faculty
OIT provides free virtual servers to support researchers and faculty, and support the University’s research mission.
Each researcher and faculty member may request one virtual server with up to 500 GB of data storage.
The typical setup will be a 1 CPU, 1 GB Memory VM server with a Microsoft Server OS or Red Hat OS. Different operating systems may be configured upon request, provided OIT has access to the software.
To request a free server, email ResearchSupport@boisestate.edu with your contact information (including your department name), and ask for “Free server and storage.”
A systems engineer will contact you to determine your specific needs, desired platform type and server support responsibility. Your server will be configured as quickly as possible, with ownership transferred to a designated system admin. Servers are backed up for disaster recovery and located in production server space on UPS and generator power with appropriate cooling. OIT’s Systems Engineers maintain and update the back end servers and provide 7/24 monitoring of systems.
Virtual Servers for Colleges and Departments
OIT can provide cost-effective, hosted servers for departments, colleges, programs and researchers to eliminate the need for groups to manage equipment. Departments and programs can maintain control of software applications and effectively allocate resources. Virtual servers can be custom-configured with required CPU’s, memory and storage.
Servers can be designated as managed or unmanaged. With a managed server system, admin services will be shared. For unmanaged systems, admin services will be the responsibility of the faculty, researcher or college.
To request a virtual server for a college or department, email ResearchSupport@boisestate.edu with your contact information (including your department name).
High Performance Computing (HPC)
OIT and Idaho National Laboratory (INL) have formalized a Memorandum of Understanding and Service Level Agreement to locate a Boise State HPC cluster at the Supercomputing Center near the Center for Advanced Energy Studies (CAES) in Idaho Falls. The INL center is a state-of-the-art national supercomputing center.
The new “R1” HPC cluster is a 12-node GPU cluster. The HPC system is expected to expand as additional research funding becomes available.
OIT has a full-time dedicated System Administrator operating and maintaining the HPC and visualization cluster for the campus community. This System Administrator works with campus researchers to assist with their College HPC clusters, and aids in use of the centralized CPU cluster.
In addition, Idaho National Labs (INL) has offered use of their 8,000 node HPC cluster to Boise State. Known as Icestorm, the cluster is capable of 17,780 Gflops max, 21,791 Gflops peak with 81.59 % efficiency.
Icestorm is an SGI Altrix ICE distributed memory computer, with 256-blade dual-quad-core Intel Xeon processors for a total of 2048 computing cores.
The INL High-Performance Computing Center includes a 3,700 sq ft raised floor computer area (expandable to 10,000 sq ft). The Computing Center is designed to be highly energy efficient and utilizes a modern cooling system functioning at a higher efficiency than conventional data centers. The environmentally friendly design includes a generator capable of using 15 % biodiesel for backup power.
Learn more about the High Performance Computing Cluster, or request access to the High Performance Computer Cluster by sending email to ResearchSupport@boisestate.edu with your contact information (including your department name).