CC* Compute: NCShare Compute as a Service (CaaS)
- Awarding agency: National Science Foundation
- Amount: $397,557
- Grant dates: 5/1/22 – 4/30/24
- PI: Charles Kneifel, Senior Technical Director, Duke University
- co-PIs: Tracy Futhey, Vice President for Information Technology and CIO, Duke University; Leah Kraus, CIO, North Carolina Central University; and Kevin Davis, CIO, Davidson College
- though MCNC not a co-PI on this award, MCNC will be service provider to enable CaaS environment
This collaboration among Duke University, North Carolina Central University (NCCU), and Davidson College builds a shared computing environment housed at North Carolina’s research and education network provider called MCNC. The shared computing environment supports a common set of software and science drivers, with priority use by Davidson, NCCU, and other North Carolina minority-serving and smaller institutions; OSG and Duke would have lower-priority use, if excess-capacity exists. As a result, faculty at participating institutions, who often juggle high course loads, have access to tools and services that ease the delivery of customized computing systems to meet their research needs and enable easy access to powerful tools for students.The project’s shared computing environment comprises 768 CPUs, 6144GB of RAM, and 250TB of storage and uses federated logins (Shibboleth-enabled) to support a large and diverse set of users at NCCU and Davidson. The environment is extended in a cloud model to other minority-serving and smaller schools in NC and encompasses other options for logins. The project leverages Duke’s already mature capability in automated provisioning, software containerization, and advanced networking, which accelerates implementation and makes computation and powerful software environments quickly available to researchers and educators in the region. More information here: https://ncshare.org/
