Please use this guide for budgetary and/or other inquiries. We strongly encourage you to contact askIT@albany.edu for consultation on any purchase that includes research-related hardware or compute needs.

Information on UAlbany’s Current and Future Research Computing Capabilities

Advanced Cluster through the AI Initiative

As a part of the AI initiative, New York State has invested $75 million to procure a new AI cluster to be installed and managed by the University at Albany. The first phase of the initiative, to be completed in Fall 2024, includes: 

• 24 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems (each with 8 NVIDIA A100 GPUs)

• 3 Lambda scalers (each with 8 NVIDIA L40s) 

• Over 6 petabytes of NetApp storage

The University currently has a NVIDIA DGX cloud offering which includes 32 A100 GPUs and 250TB of all-flash performance storage. 

These resources are expected to exceed our current on-premises offering and provide advanced resources while the AI cluster is being installed. All these resources will be available to new faculty to get their research programs up and running.  

Access to other AI Resources

All UAlbany faculty also have access to the AiMOS cluster. The Artificial Intelligence Multiprocessing Optimized System, AiMOS, was launched in 2019 by a unique partnership between New York State, IBM, RPI, and SUNY. With 8 petaflops configured to enable the exploration of new AI applications, AiMOS is currently the most powerful supercomputer in the State of New York. Located at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, it serves as a test bed for the New York State-IBM Research AI Hardware Center and is accessible to faculty and students from SUNY to conduct research. Documentation related to AiMOS can be found here.

Other Major HPC Resources

The University currently manages an HPC cluster consisting of 60 computational nodes with 4368 CPU cores and 12 NVIDIA A40 GPUs.

UAlbany researchers receive 10GB of personal research data storage and 10TB of shared storage for their research groups. Research storage is encrypted at rest, compressed, de-duplicated, and backed up daily via “snapshot” for 21 days, and hourly for the past 23 hours. Additional storage capacity is available and will be further expanded to include fast, premium NVMe flash storage, along with economical cold storage for holding large data sets at rest.

General Information For Grants:

• AI Computing Cluster

• Data Center Information

• High-Performance Computing Cluster

• Network Information

• Research Data Storage

• Research Support and Software

Research Protected Cloud Enclave

ITS offers a Windows-based protected research environment compliant with the federal government’s current NIST 800-171 requirements. Prior to use, the protected research environment needs to be included in the grant budgeting process to account for associated costs. Cost is calculated per request and will be provided with "copy and paste" language for the associated grant application. Please contact askIT@albany.edu for pricing and consultation. 

NFS Storage

Cost

$50 per TB per year

CPU Compute

Cost

$2800 per node per year

Security Information

NFS Storage may be used for Category 3 data, as defined by the Data Classification Standard. All other datasets require ITS consultation (askIT@albany.edu) to determine if NFS storage may be used.

• Access is manged via LDAP groups and provisioned to users by ITS

• Data are encrypted at rest

Procedures

Information Technology Services (ITS) provides 10TB of research storage and up to $1,500/yr worth of VM computing services, as a standard offering, at no cost to research centers and researchers.

The cost below is intended to be used either as part of the grant proposal or to support billing activities for services beyond the standard offering. 

Researchers who would like to purchase bulk NFS storage as a direct-cost to grant funding, should schedule a consultation with askIT@albany.edu during grant preparation to ensure availability and appropriate size estimates. Researcher's are expected to budget $50 per TiB per year and detail in their storage management plan how the data will be stored after the grant is complete. RTS will provide a statement of support that is consistent with the data management plan. Upon the grant's funding, the researcher must provide billing information to ITS, and storage will be allocated upon payment. All storage is reclaimed upon the grants completion.

Virtual Machine

In rare cases, the general purpose computing cluster is not sufficient for research needs. ITS provides access to stand alone virtual machines when necessary. Researchers interested in stand-alone virtual machines should schedule a consultation with askIT@albany.edu during grant preparation.