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UND Division of Research
Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Plan

Priority Action Area – B (Hardware - Computing)
Goal One: Provide High Performance Computing resources to all faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students.

Action Plan:

1. Update, expand or replace the Computational Research Center cluster hardware as required to meet faculty and graduate student research needs.
2. Purchase a shared memory multiprocessor supercomputer to be used by faculty and graduate students in their research to run software applications that require this hardware environment.
3. Encourage and assist faculty and graduate student researchers to apply to NSF and other funded high performance computing centers for computing time.
4. Establish a HPC cluster for students that exploits the unused computational cycles of general-use machines.

Goal Two: Maintain proper environment and facilities for sustaining HPC resources.

Action Plan:

1. Establish climate control policies that are favorable to the efficient operation of computational and visualization systems.
   1. Proper HVAC settings for maintaining cool environments
   2. Access to uninterrupted power sources.
   3. Ensure that campus data center policies allow for adequate physical access by vetted personnel whose projects utilize these facilities.
2. Promote use of energy efficient hardware systems whenever possible.
3. Seek research opportunities in the area of energy efficient HPC architecture and design.

Goal Three: Increase data storage capacity in support of increased learning and research usage.

Action Plan:

1. Assess storage needs.
   1. Archiving Research Data
   2. Digital Repositories
   3. Searchable web databases
2. Coordinate multiple efforts to increase storage.
   1. 24hr staff support
   2. Select and fund shared storage facility
3. Identify tools necessary for easy access and retrieval of information.
4. Investigate off-campus resources with other organizations.

Goal Four: Maintain a repository for the purposes of maintaining and sharing research computer code.

Action Plan:

1. Identify off-campus code repository resources
2. Implement local repository services as necessary

Goal Five: Provide access to visualization systems for data analysis in the form of stereowalls and streaming to the web.

Action Plan:

1. Identify need
2. Implement software solutions for Computational Research Center stereowall projection system
3. Investigate methods for piping data from HPC environment to web-page display of data.