Facilities and Equipment

NSF Facilities, Equipment and Other Resources Template

The text provided below may be used as a starting template for any NDSU proposal. The description and format is designed to address requirements for the National Science Foundation, but this information is keep current by CCAST and may be appropriate for proposals to other funding agencies.

Expansions or customization of these descriptions may be expected for individual proposals. Please consult the funding opportunity solicitation for further instructions.

NDSU Facilities and Resources

North Dakota State University (NDSU) maintains high-speed connectivity to the national Internet2 network, national research computing resources (e.g. XSEDE and OSG), and local resources for NDSU researchers and their collaborators. The current campus backbone is 10Gbps with a planned upgrade to 100Gbps. We currently have two 10Gbps connections to Internet POPs also intended to be upgraded to 100Gbps in 2019.

There are four (4) computing machine rooms on the NDSU campus with power and cooling capacities indicated in the table below.

Location

Power

Cooling

QBB:  4,004 sq. ft mixed density data center

200KW

371KW

R1: 1188 sq. ft. low density computer room

100KW

100KW

R2: 1000 sq. ft. high power density HPC room

500KW

(1MW design max)

600KW

Barry Hall: 616 sq. ft. mixed density computer room

34KW

53KW

The Center for Computationally Assisted Science and Technology (CCAST) at NDSU maintains two research clusters and one teaching cluster and has brokered access to other resources from partner institutions and commercial partners.

The Thunder cluster is CCAST’s flagship cluster for general purpose supercomputing. It has 63 nodes with a total of 1260 cores and 6.1 TB RAM total. There are 2 large memory nodes with 1TB of RAM each. The aggregate processing power of this cluster is 40 TFLOPS.

Cluster3 is a 127 node Nehalem cluster used currently for serial processing jobs. CCAST is currently in the process of adding to this cluster and repurposing it as a virtualization cluster to allow researchers to run virtual machine images meeting the needs of their particular analysis. We are striving to make this facility compatible with and smoothly connected to the JetStream resource in XSEDE and eventually one or more commercial cloud provider.

CCAST provides 600 TB of GPFS storage connected to the supercomputers and has a 750 TB capacity tape robot for storage of backups. IT provides 550 TB of storage connected via CIFS and NFS to campus workstations and personal clients (laptops, etc.). CCAST and IT are in the process of designing improved data integration between the two facilities and the NDSU’s library-run Institutional Repository. In addition, NDSU has contracted with Microsoft and Google to access their cloud storage (OneDrive and Drive respectively).

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