Hardware Investing Policy

Pitt CRC encourages researchers to allocate grant dollars or startup funds to enable CRC to purchase hardware that becomes part of computing resources for the broader Pitt community, rather than buying and managing their own hardware or maintaining inefficient old hardware that becomes a maintenance burden. Faculty who do so are called investors. Investing benefits faculty in several ways.

• The hardware is professionally managed by the Network Operations Center at no charge, including state of the art networking and security practices.
• Investors receive a 5-year user allocation on CRC hardware, equivalent to the computational resources that they would have utilized had they purchased and housed hardware within their own group. This allows them to use the capabilities of the full set of CRC resources, instead of the limited capabilities of their invested equipment.
• Investors receive higher priority on jobs submitted to CRC resources.
• Investors can take advantage of lower equipment prices negotiated by CRC based on our large volumes.

Even given these advantages, CRC has found that some faculty in a position to invest have been reluctant to do so because they wanted immediate access to computing resources when necessary. To address this need, CRC has revised the investor policy so that now investors can maintain exclusive access to up to 20 percent of the hardware purchased with their funds.

The benefit to the University is that the pool of resources available to the community increases, security is enhanced, and the energy consumed by the invested equipment is likely to be much lower than if the invested equipment had been hosted in individual labs.