CSE Reseachers may use this Facilities Statement in NSF grant proposals.
Concise Facilities Statement
General research facilities include more than 300 servers, workstations, and PCs. The systems include a wide range of standalone servers dedicated to support infrastructure services, general purpose servers for student coursework and research computing, and a Dell PowerEdge based virtual machine infrastructure. These systems have access to NetApp FAS2650 and Dell/EMC VNXe 3150 storage systems for network based storage. Nine Dell Optiplex systems are configured as Linux and Windows student workstations. Laser printing resources are readily available.
Program-specific research facilities include over 50 dedicated research systems. The Bioinformatics, Database, Data Mining, and Multimedia Group houses dedicated Oracle, MySQL, and compute servers. Lab space and offices provided in Davis Hall houses workstations and specialized equipment for researchers.
The PI in his office has [insert office stuff here].
Extended Facilities Statement
Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) maintains multiple information technology services and facilities to support its research mission. These resources and facilities include (but are not limited to):
Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) data storage facilities include a NetApp FAS2650 and a Dell/EMC VNXe 3150 for network file storage. Several network attached storage devices, exceeding 30 TB are used by researchers for various purposes. A variety of timeshare machines and virtualized servers running samba provide data access services.
CSE student compute systems include several general purpose timeshare computers, a variety of workstations available in publicly accessible spaces, and several labs dedicated to specific courses.
CSE research groups occupy 6628 square feet of research lab space ranging from secure, monitored, temperature-controlled data centers to specialized experimental facilities. CSE instructional labs occupy 4096 square feet, each configured to serve the characteristic needs of the courses they host.
The department maintains 400+ Linux, Windows, and MacOS compute devices (servers, workstations, and other devices) across our multiple research, instructional, and student labs. Each lab is equipped with presentation equipment. Internet connectivity to all lab workstations is provided by Ethernet network connections and the campus-wide wireless network also provides network access for students' personal devices.
CSE faculty, researchers and students also have access to compute labs administered by School of Engineering Node Services (SENS) and Computing and Information Technology (CIT).
Our four CSE conference rooms occupy 2075 square feet, all of which are equipped with presentation equipment and data terminals to enable research presentations.
Our four state of the art data centers occupy 2,173 square feet, all of which are environmentally conditioned and monitored 24/7. Power redundancy is handled both by an emergency generator located in the mechanical penthouse and 48 double-conversion Liebert GXT3 uninterruptable power supplies. Network connectivity to the data centers is provided by 7 Cisco Catalyst gigabit layer 3 switches. Various level 3 switches are all connected to the campus 10Gb/s fiber backbone. Each data center has incrementally increasing access levels ranging from student or research group access to authorized personnel only access.
Access to all CSE facilities is handled by a OnGuard card access system which CSE has customized with automated update scripts and web forms to enable low management and administration overhead.
Both Windows and Linux based desktop virtualization infrastructures allow CSE faculty, researchers and students to connect to their hosted workspaces, applications and data from anywhere an internet connection is available. The University provides the Cisco Anyconnect virtual private network client so that off campus hosts can access resources securely.
Advanced web services and several application frameworks are provided to all CSE faculty, researchers and students. MySQL and PostgreSQL database services are also provided. Students also have access to the enterprise-wide Academic Oracle Service (AOS) and enterprise-wide compute and e-mail servers.
CSE provides networking and firewalling services with a model that seeks to balance researcher flexibility and the need to keep University and CSE services and networks safe, secure, and functional. This is accomplished with the use of:
Our departmental systems are backed up using UB’s enterprise-wide IBM Spectrum Protect storage management service, which backs up data to an off-site facility.
UB's Center for Computational Research (CCR) provides an extensive research computing infrastructure described here:
https://www.buffalo.edu/ccr/services/high-performance-computing.html