CC* Compute: NCShare Compute as a Service

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.

By starting from a common base environment and then supporting customizations that can meet the specific research and education demands of participating institutions, this project provides hands-on opportunities for students to use advanced science capabilities and software environments. The result enhances STEM education at participating campuses by enabling advanced access to science capacity on those campuses.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.