Proposal

About four years ago (Fall 2009) using PICO funds the College of Engineering and Computer Science was able to invest in a Cloud based infrastructure to support “any time”, ”anywhere” to our cloud based desktops.  Students can now access their cloud desktops from the majority of mobile devices and standard PCs and laptops.  For the past year, our college has begun to exceed the resources we have at hand to support these students.  We are at point where we need to add additional compute resources to our cloud so that it continues to be an enterprise class computing environment.  Specifically we would need to add four more servers to our cloud infrastructure to take on the extra load.  The four machines would be Dell R720 class servers with 10 gigabit networking and a combination of host accelerators cards and NVIDIA grid computing cards to handle the graphic intensive applications that our students use.

The expansion of the College of Engineering & Computer Science’s Cloud based infrastructure enriches the educational experience by allowing students to access software remotely.  They no longer have to come on campus to access computer labs.  Students can now work remotely from home.  The expansion of the cloud desktops will strengthen and expand our undergraduate programs as our students have varied schedules and making the compute resources available to them from anywhere and anytime will accommodate this and help ensure our students are successful.