Proposal

The purpose of this tech fee proposal is to upgrade our existing 42 seat Citrix Lab VDI infrastructure with NVidia Grid vGPU technology by purchasing four NVidia Grid K1 GPUs.  We currently have four 12G Dell servers that host 70 department student lab Virtual Desktops and 25 department graduate student virtual desktops.  Our Citrix VDI infrastructure has performed superbly supporting about 300 students per semester in our Boca lab of 42 thin clients and another 25 graduate assigned thin clients. VDI has revolutionized our computing by dramatically reducing IT maintenance and software updates as well as driven down our desktop per user cost from about $1,000 to about $500.  The one short coming has been reduced graphics performance due to a lack of dedicated video cards in VDI.  However, NVidia has recently released a new Grid computing based GPU that allows for shared GPUs with VDI.  Each card supports up to 32 virtual desktops so we want to install one Grid K1 card in each of our four VDI servers. In making this upgrade, we believe that our virtual desktops will be indistinguishable from the traditional desktop, meeting all their performance metrics at nearly half the cost.

Existing courses that will benefit from the lab upgrade:

Weather and Climate Discussion sections (MET 2010):  These are weekly discussion sections for the Intellectual Foundations course Weather and Climate.  Up to 200 students in 8 sections use the computer lab for guided online assignments requiring Web Access and general productivity software

Various online and face-to-face courses:  We have 8-10 online and F2F courses, primarily in Geographical Information Systems, that hold lab help sessions in this lab, with about 100 students participating each week.

Open lab time:  When this lab is not being used for scheduled classes and help sessions (including weekends), it is available for students in our various classes to use for their other Geosciences’ coursework.  This represents another 50-100 students per week.

Strategic Plan Goal I: Enrich the Educational Experience

In our commitment to continual improvement of the University educational experience we must enhance the quality of undergraduate and graduate academic programs.  Our VDI infrastructure provides critical access to Web-based content, productivity software and specialized department licensed software.  The trend today in education is rich, multi-media and web based content. That require GPU capabilities our existing VDI’s do not have.  The new vGPU upgrade  will dramatically improve the performance of our state of the art lab serving more than 300 students each week. With the vGPU upgrade, we will move our department into next generation cloud computing that performs as good as or better than traditional desktops.

Goal IV: Leverage momentum toward achieving FAU’s strategic goals by being good stewards of its human, technological, physical and financial resources.

As the area's preeminent institute of higher learning, FAU should be setting the “gold” standard for all its teaching facilities.  The trend in IT today is away from high cost, high maintenance desktops to centralized computing in the data center with low cost, low energy use thin clients for user access.  Geosciences has already demonstrated the success with its current VDI infrastructure and wishes to continue moving our performance standards forward. While these Grid cards cost $2,200 each, they also each support up to 32 virtual desktops, which works out to only about $69 per desktop.  This is much cheaper that if we were adding individual high performance graphics cards to physical desktops.

Purchase by end of Spring 2014, install/test during the summer, production use in Fall 2014

Hardware is anticipated to last 4-5 years.

·      The Department of Geosciences already maintains it’s Citrix XenDesktop VDI infrastructure, including VDI hosts, VDI controllers, shared NFS storage, networking, server racks, etc.

·      At its own cost, the Department recently upgraded its Citrix Xenapp servers with NVidia Quadro GPUs to provide this higher level graphics performance to our Cloud applications for eLearning students off campus.  This upgrade will bring the same increased graphics performance to our on-campus labs.