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Grant Support

We help faculty develop grant proposals with computing components in areas such as equipment acquisition, research, allocations on high-performance computing (HPC) systems, education, training, institutional activities (e.g., workshops and conferences), and basic research. Grant development services include:

  • Research technology/OIT collaboration scope and budget development. Go to our Research Technology Services page for more information, and contact us if you require additional hardware or personnel to support your project.
  • Facilities & Other Resources documentation
  • Support with identifying potential funding opportunities related to cyberinfrastructure

The Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP) is responsible for the final review of all grant proposals to make certain they conform to the current regulations of the University, State and Federal guidelines, and the potential sponsor. Additional support is provided by Boise State’s Office of Research Development.

The following language is recommended for describing institutional research technology resources.

Office of Information Technology Resources

RESEARCH COMPUTING SUPPORT DEPARTMENT (RCSD)

The Division of Research and Economic Development and the Office of Information Technology established RCSD to centralize and improve support for the university’s cyberinfrastructure computing assets. The Research Computing Support Department does the following:

  • Provides robust cyberinfrastructure including storage, computational power, and connectivity to guarantee faculty a dedicated and reliable cyber environment to conduct their research.
  • Assists researchers and faculty with centralized high-performance computing (HPC), installing, troubleshooting, and providing optimization support.
  • Provides a senior scientific programmer for customized programming, a senior cyberinfrastructure engineer for network and storage optimization, and a senior HPC engineer for HPC onboarding, training, and development.
  • Conducts outreach and training, including one-on-one training and consultation and hands-on cluster labs and Software Carpentry workshops during Research Computing Days.
  • Works with the Boise State University Research Cyberinfrastructure Advisory Council to achieve their mission to develop a robust and reliable environment for research. That plan involves providing network speed, computational power, storage and seamless connectivity to researchers and faculty while ensuring centralized support and communication for ongoing cyberinfrastructure efforts.

COMPUTE & STORAGE RESOURCES

Server & Storage Resources – The Office of Information Technology (OIT) provides scalable, dependable and affordable virtual servers and storage for faculty, researchers, and colleges. In addition, OIT has built a dependable enterprise virtual server infrastructure and network attached storage to provide researchers and colleges methods to utilize 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. The platform is built with redundancy and is auto correcting. Servers can be designated managed or unmanaged based on the faculty technical expertise or department IT support available to the department. With a managed server, system administration services are shared. On servers designated as unmanaged, system administration services are the responsibility of the researcher or college.

Borah – Borah is a heterogeneous cluster installed at Idaho National Laboratory’s Collaborative Computing Center (C3), where Idaho institutions have been invited to install computing equipment in support of collaborative research among the universities, Idaho National Laboratory researchers, and industry partners. The university-owned portion of the cluster was funded by the Vice President of Research, Vice President of Finance and Administration, and the Provost. The cluster, including faculty buy-in nodes, has 41 nodes, each with two Intel Xeon Gold 6252 2.1G, 24-core CPUs; 4 GPU nodes, each with two NVIDIA Tesla V100s; and 1 high memory node, with 768 GB of RAM, and two Intel Xeon Gold 6252 2.1G, 24-core CPUs. The cluster is attached to 730 TB of resilient, high-performing Isilon storage that uses an Infiniband high-speed interconnect. Borah is accessible via IRON’s (Idaho Regional Optical Network) 100GB connection dedicated to research and education which peers with Internet2, the nation’s largest and fastest, coast-to-coast research and education network.

Falcon Super Computer at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) – Idaho National Laboratory makes the Top 500 supercomputer known as “Falcon” available to Boise State researchers. The 25,056-processor Silicon Graphics International Corporation (SGI) supercomputer has 124 TB of memory and an aggregate peak processing rate of 786 TFLOPS.

NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE AND RESOURCES

Boise State University has a centralized network infrastructure supporting academic, research and business needs. Sensor, computing, wireless, application level, emergency-response, and VOIP communication networks overlay this infrastructure. The Office of Information Technology (OIT) has a single mission with regard to the University data networks—provide a data network that is stable, reliable and available all of the time. Boise State University operates the data network with a goal of 99.999% uptime. Boise State’s centralized network infrastructure is a 10GB fiber loop between three campus hub facilities, each with backup power and conditioned air space, and is 100% Cisco networked. All major research buildings on campus are connected at 10GB to the core, with all other buildings connected at 1GB. The University is connected to Time Warner Telecom, 360Networks, Qwest Communications, Syringa Networks, Integra Networks, and Level3 Communications networks.

Science DMZ – Boise State was also awarded a Science DMZ grant from the National Science Foundation (Award Number: 1541464). The Science DMZ allows Boise State to expand the capabilities of its research network to facilitate shared network, data, and compute resources and enables collaboration among researchers to accelerate scientific discovery.

Globus – Boise State maintains a Globus subscription for managed endpoints which facilitates collaborative data access using a convenient user interface and infrastructure for moving data between accessible Globus endpoints. This includes movement to and from XSEDE resources and other research and academic infrastructure as well as to and from personal workstations using the Globus Connect Personal software. This service makes it easy for researchers to reliably move large data sets asynchronously.

Idaho Regional Optical Network – Through the Idaho Regional Optical Network (IRON), Boise State connects to Internet2 and Quilt through the Utah Education Network (UEN, and the Pacific Northwest GigaPOP in Seattle). IRON’s I2 peering is 100 GB. Boise State is connected to IRON on a 100 GB privately-owned fiber circuit, and the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is currently connected to IRON on a 100 GB circuit, called the Educational Ecosystem, and is 2 router hops from Boise State on private circuits. IRON’s 100GB Educational Ecosystem is connects Idaho institutions together with the INL and is dedicated to education and research network traffic.