The below summary can be used as a starting point for a "Facilities, Equipment and Other Resources" section for an NSF proposal.
We strongly encourage you contact researchit@iastate.edu to discuss the details of your project so we can help craft an appropriate list of applicable equipment and determine if additional equipment, storage, or other resources such as hosting costs, consulting, or developer time should be included in your proposal.
Human Resources
The ResearchIT team specializes in collaborating with researchers to solve complex technology problems, freeing them up to focus on their research. We support several large clusters, research server grids, large scale research storage, virtual server and container based environments for research, web applications, and hundreds of scientific software applications. The team is composed of 5 full time staff and partial time from a number of other Systems Analysts, with a total combined FTE of approximately 15 specialists who provide their expertise to consult on projects and manage the various services that we offer.
Equipment and Facilities
Iowa State, through the help of the NSF MRI program and other funding programs and agencies, has invested heavily in computational resources. In addition to our campus wide HPC cluster we also have more than two dozen specialized servers for performing diverse tasks such as large memory genome assembly, many core parallel jobs such as alignment, high throughput single core jobs, and machine learning using the latest GPUs. We have a robust virtual machine and container based infrastructure with enterprise-grade performance and availability that allows us to host web applications with excellent up-time. We also have a multi-petabyte storage system for secure retention of long term research data. All of our equipment is professionally managed by IT staff, and housed in our secure, climate controlled data center.
Equipment summary:
- Nova HPC Cluster
- ~250 non-GPU nodes (48-192 CPU cores, 384GB-3TB of memory per node)
- ~50 GPU nodes with over 200 GPU cards total, including 124 Nvidia A100 80GB cards
- Over 45K threads and ~250TB of memory across all compute nodes
- Virtual servers: a cluster of over twenty hypervisors available supporting VMs for development, testing, and web application hosting
- Container environment: a Kubernetes-based container hosting environment for research applications
- Storage: a multi petabyte long term storage system (LSS), and approx 1 PB of high-performance scratch space
For more detailed equipment information, please see: https://research.it.iastate.edu/nova-hardware