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.
RECOMMENDED LANGUAGE FOR GRANTS
The following language is recommended for describing institutional research technology resources.
Office of Information Technology Resources
RESEARCH COMPUTING SUPPORT
The Division of Research and Economic Development and the Office of Information Technology established Research Computing to centralize and improve support for the university’s cyberinfrastructure computing assets. The Research Computing 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.
- Conducts outreach and training, including one-on-one training and consultation and hands-on cluster labs and Software Carpentry workshops during Research Computing Days.
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 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 “condo” nodes, has 58 CPU nodes, each with two Intel Xeon Gold 6252 2.1G, 24-core CPUs; our GPU nodes include four NVIDIA Tesla V100s with two GPUs per node, five P100 nodes each with two GPUs, nine NVIDIA L40s nodes with four GPUs per node, an NVIDIA A30 node, and an RTX node with eight GPUs; additionally, a high memory node has 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 and 100 TB of Vast flash (NVMe) storage that use 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.
Lemhi Super Computer at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) –Idaho National Laboratory makes the “Lemhi” supercomputer available to Boise State researchers through the C3+3 collaboration — a partnership between Idaho National Laboratory’s Collaborative Computing Center (C3) and Idaho’s three public research universities (Boise State University,Idaho State University, and University of Idaho). The 20,160-core, 504-node supercomputer provides 94.5 terabytes of memory and a theoretical peak performance of 1.55 petaFLOPS. Each node is equipped with dual Intel Xeon Gold 6148 20-core processors running at 2.4 GHz and 192 GB of RAM. The system includes 1.2 petabytes of Ceph project storage.
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 IRON, Internet2, and multiple commodity service provider 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 ACCESS 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.