Project Goals

The C3+3 partners are actively collaborating on projects to enhance and expand the accessibility and capacity of the state’s CI resources. Below are brief descriptions of the teams’ efforts. If you’d like to learn more about these projects or upcoming education and training activities, please contact us.

Shared Research Storage

The goal of this project is to design and deploy shared network and storage infrastructure that allows researchers from the University of Idaho, Boise State University, and Idaho State University to access research storage on their respective university’s networks. This infrastructure makes stored data accessible in place so research collaborators can share and work on the data together–no need to transfer or copy.

Federated Identity/Authentication for Shared Research Infrastructure

The goal of the project is to plan, design, and deploy into production a system that allows users from Idaho State University, University of Idaho, and Boise State University to access specific shared cyberinfrastructure by authenticating via their normal institutional methods. This will alleviate the need to establish an isolated and independent directory server; simplifies the user experience for researchers; and supports security compliance with the policies and procedures from each of the universities.

C3+3 Grant Collaboration

The C3+3 institutions are regularly looking for and evaluating opportunities to work on collaborative proposals that advance computational training and education, expand CI capacity and infrastructure, and support workshop development. We encourage and support collaborative proposals among researchers requiring CI resources, education, and training.

INL’s Transition of the Falcon Supercomputer to University Management

INL plans to transition its 34,992 CPU core Falcon supercomputer to the Idaho higher education ecosystem for management and exclusive use. The goals of this project are to generate an order-of-magnitude increase in the computing capacity for University researchers at relatively low cost; make available additional compute cycles (245 million annual core-hours) to Idaho universities that they would otherwise be unable to utilize; and strengthen collaborations among Boise State University, University of Idaho, and Idaho State University while fostering connections with other national universities.

Cyberinfrastructure Installations at Idaho National Laboratory’s (INL) Collaborative Computing Center (C3)

Each of the C3+3 institutions has been invited to install CI infrastructure in INL’s dedicated university row located in their C3 data center. University of Idaho has deployed their Northwest Knowledge Network (NKN), an Idaho-based regional research data repository and data technology service center. The NKN infrastructure has enabled the universities’ shared storage project at C3. Boise State University has installed its newest HPC system, Borah, in university row. Borah offers Boise State and Idaho researchers more than three times the computational power of Boise State’s previous HPC system.

Education and Training:

The C3+3 consortium collaborates to expand existing symposiums and workshops to Idaho partners to increase ecosystem exposure. Education and training opportunities include Software Carpentry Workshops; a variety of computational tools workshops, including tools for data visualization, data mining, and machine learning; and a variety of symposium activities including research presentations, lighting talks, and poster sessions.