The sections below are the components that need to be inserted into a proposal requesting $13,000 for acquisition of NCUs and storage. Note that the facilities document should be provided as supplementary material.
Project Description
Insert the text below into your proposal’s project description.
The project requires access to high-performance computing resources that go beyond what is readily available in a desktop computer or a workstation. We anticipate the need to use 40 normalized computing units (NCUs) on average as well as 8 TB of Blue storage. UF Research Computing operates a computing cluster with the cost to acquire these resources for the three year duration of the project for $13,000. This acquisition will allow us to burst the utilization to a much higher number of NCUs when needed for the project, which is an additional advantage for working with UF Research Computing. See the budget justification and the facilities sections for the details, which include the description of the support from the University that will be leveraged for this project by making the acquisition through UF Research Computing.
Budget Item
Insert a value of $13,000 in the equipment budget.
NOTE: This is not a budget item for computer services. These funds will be used to buy a portion of a larger compute cluster. They are viewed by accounting as a hardware acquisition, not the purchase of services.
Budget Justification
Insert the text below in the budget justification. If the format of the proposal does not have a separate facilities section, you should replace the reference to the facilities section in the text below with the actual text from the Facilities section from the HPC proposal support pages.
UF Research Computing operates a cluster for research use by faculty and their research associates. The details of the operation are described under the Facilities section of this proposal. This includes a description of the resources made available by the University to support HPC-related research. By buying a part of the shared cluster at $200 per NCU (normalized computing unit), our research project leverages the whole infrastructure, which includes system acquisition, configuration, installation, administration, maintenance, and application support by professional staff to the researchers working in this project. In addition we will require 8 TB of research data storage for the proposed project; this costs $625 per TB for the five years of the project, or $125 per TB per year of the project.
The budget of (40 NCUs x $200/NCU) + (8TB x $625)=$13,000 acquires for the proposed project a system with a total of 40 NCUs and 8TB of storage along with necessary memory, disk, network, global parallel file system, and batch-job scheduling software. In addition to the guaranteed 40 NCUs, the researchers supported by the proposed project can submit jobs that request up to 10 times that number of NCUs for short times as resources are available. This will benefit the proposed project greatly, especially when results need to be ready for a conference or other deadlines.