Proposal

Narrative

The cloud is becoming a common place term that spans all the fields of academia. It could be a economic/business major needing to analyze decades worth of stock prices, or a molecular biology student performing genome sequencing, or a physics student simulating a supernova explosion or a computer science student testing the next generation of machine learning or neural networks. Ultimately, the technology is now available to provide them the immense compute and storage power of the cloud within a matter of minutes. Gone are the days of waiting weeks or months to order a computer, wait for IT to configure it, install the software, test/debug the setup and finally actually get to the research or class projects. The public cloud (such as Amazon Web Services [AWS] or Microsoft Azure) now enable our students to launch and use compute capacity as needed. FAU has signed on board with both AWS and Azure for providing compute on demand for our students and faculty. However, a major hinderance is the need to secure funding to test out student class projects or research ideas in this cloud as using those services does cost money. While both services provide a “free-tier” to learn their services, the free-tier isn’t enough to perform any actual real-work. This proposal is to secure techfee funds to allow our students, regardless of college to engage with the College of Engineering’s IT staff (who have experience using both AWS and Azure) in order to secure compute capacity in either public cloud. The funds will be used to setup a master account from which students will be allowed sub-accounts to run their class or research projects. In order to prevent any sort of bias towards engineering only applications, we will also encourage the IT staff of other Colleges to participate in the engagement process with their students. We are asking for $25k to allow for both small and large projects which might be compute or storage intensive. As funds to not expire, we will be able to use them across multiple years if needed as AWS and Azure will bill against a blanket Purchase Order. Any student who graduates from FAU and has experience using AWS or Azure will have a step above their peers who have only used desktops or localized servers. They will have expanded their ability to solve problems that are magnitudes above the traditional problems because their would have been given access to the tools that the public cloud provides. It is our hope that this techfee proposal will be funded to bootstrap such a process and we hope to report back in a year with success stories. We realize that this is a new field for both our students and the university and approving this will require a level of trust in using the funds wisely. We propose to setup a website of success stories based on use-cases by our students so that the results are audit-able and visible to the public. You can read more on AWS cloud at https://aws.amazon.com/education/

Facilities

Hardware Requirements

None. All services will be used in the public cloud and as such no on-premise hardware is required.

Software Requirements

None

Personnel Costs

None

Other Costs

As the cloud is neither software nor hardware specific. We have listed the costs under 'other'.

Timeline

We will to provide a prototype lab environment in the summer 2017 and broadly open it up for general student access in Fall 2017.

Sustainability

If Successful, we hope that amazon will continue their education/training program with the university and the techfee will continue to fund future projects.

Resource Matching

Amazon Web Services has committed to offering training for students and staff (each class is valued at $2000-$2500 each).

Implementing Organization

The College of Engineering & Computer Science IT staff will provide the primary support and will reach out to the respective IT staff of each college if requests come in from their college students.