The College of Engineering and Computer Science has a private desktop cloud that has been utilized for the past few years to provide remote desktops to our students, faculty and staff. Initially funded by the college/university and since supported in part by techfee and college funds, the desktop cloud has been a crucial part of our college infrastructure. It has allowed our students to access engineering applications from anywhere in the world and facilitated a greener IT by allowing students to perform their engineering work from home or the dorms without needing to drive to campus.
This system has and will continue to serve the general desktop needs of our students. However, more and more students are requesting access for computing capabilities for the class projects, research projects and self-training. The desktop cloud is limited in this type of capability.
For the past year, the college's IT staff have been working with a technology startup called Zero Stack. They provide the capability called "self-service cloud" which allows students and faculty to login to a web portal and request computing resources on-demand. They can use these resource to create virtual computers to run their simulations, research and class projects. When done, the virtual resources (CPU, Memory and Disk) are returned to a pool and can be repurposed for another student or faculty.
We aim to allow our junior and senior students to leverage this technology to allow them to test the latest trends in engineering and computer science without needing to wait in the IT staff to provision systems. In addition, part of the university QEP is to allow undergraduate students to do research. Any research that requires compute power is a valid use-case.
Zero Stack has recognized this use case and is willing to discount their equipment and software licenses. The hardware and software normally lists for $80,000 for the first year and another 20,000 for years two and three. They will provide the hardware and software for $50,000 and discount the 2nd and 3rd years to $5000 for each year.