Research Support

Network and Phone Services

The Network Systems Engineering Group ( ithelp@bu.edu ) maintains wired and wireless network access. See the instructions at http://www.bu.edu/tech/accounts/wireless/ to use the wireless access points. There are also wired ethernet quads (panels containing 4 ports each) in the walls of your lab. Normally, these quads have one active network port, but you can activate more by emailing ithelp@bu.edu and providing them with the number written on the quad, and the orientation (lower left, for example) of the port you wish to activate. Please check all of the ports in your lab to see if some are already active before emailing to activate new ones, because there is normally a fee for new activations.

To activate a port in your quad for telephone service, please see http://www.bu.edu/tech/comm/phone/

Websites

IS&T provides hosting services for personal web pages, lab web pages, and collaboration sites. Go to http://www.bu.edu/tech/web and  http://www.bu.edu/tech/comm/collaboration-sites/ and follow the instructions to set up these services.

Software

Boston University has a site license for Microsoft Windows and Office, which allows you to install it on any University-owned machine and also for full-time faculty and staff to use Office at home. See http://www.bu.edu/tech/desktop/site-licensed-software/microsoft .

For Linux system, we manage custom configurations of CentOS (Red Hat) and Ubuntu that provide security and access to Network Storage (ENGNAS) and Printers.

Virus protection is provided by CrowdStrike and is free with our University license.

The College and the University own certain commercial software licenses that you may be able to use. Browse the offerings here: Engineering Software and BU Site License, and also take a look at the University-discounted software available for purchase at http://www.bu.edu/tech/desktop/purchase/personal/sales.

If you wish to obtain licenses for any software that is not listed on these sites, please send us an email at enghelp@bu.edu — we may maintain a pool of private licenses that you can buy into. Take a look at the \\ad\eng\support\software fileshare for media that we may already have some licenses for.

Please send an email to enghelp@bu.edu for help installing any of this software.

File Storage

General BU Storage:

Microsoft OneDrive: 1TB of free cloud storage, available to only staff and faculty.
BU Google Drive: 15GB of free cloud storage, available to all BU community members.
BU Dropbox: 1 TB of free cloud storage, available only to ENG Staff and Faculty and researchers who request it.

SCC Project Disk Space for members using the SCC.

ENGIT’s ENGNAS: In addition to storage granted by being a member of Boston University’s Faculty & Staff, ENGIT also hosts a networked, redundant, and backed up data storage solution for members of the College of Engineering. This service is hosted on-premise as well as backed up off-site, and is only available via a networked or VPN connection.

We colloquially refer to this networked storage solution as “ENGNAS” (“NAS” stands for “Network-Attached Storage”) and it can be accessed by browsing to: \\engnas.bu.edu

COE community members have access to the following subsets of storage on \\engnas.bu.edu\:

  1. A) “X:” Drive, or “Users” Drive: 10gb of free storage for each individual user. Can be located at: \\engnas.bu.edu\Users\FirstLetterofUsername\SecondLetterofUsername\FullUsername (ie \\engnas.bu.edu\Users\e\n\engit )
  2. B) “U:” Drive, or “Research” Drive: a growable share designed for research teams or professors. Storage limits on these folders can far surpass the 1tb limit that BU offers through Dropbox or OneDrive, and are typically free until a certain ceiling of data storage is reached (usually when more than 7 or 8 TB are in use, we will begin a conversation about future storage needs to offset the cost ENGIT pays to support this service). Permissions can be granted to any members requested.
  3. C) “W:” Drive, or the “Administration” Drive: typically used for College of Engineering Administrative offices. Serves much the same purpose as the Research drive, but for college-wide administrative teams (like the Dean’s office, Graduate Programs Office, Career Development Office, etc).
  4. D) “V:” drive, or the “Courses” Drive: serves a similar purpose as the Research or Administrative drives, but designed for individual courses.
  5. E) “N:” Drive, or” Support” Drive: this is managed by ENGIT, and hosts much of our IT administrative data and tools, like software installers, individual emergency backups, and operating system data.

More information about how to access the ENGNAS drives is here: https://www.bu.edu/engit/knowledge-base/mountingengnas/

Getting Access to ENGNAS:

  • If you don’t already have one, apply for an AD account by going to http://www.bu.edu/computing/accounts/ad/engv and if you get an error message about not being in “the database”, email us at enghelp@bu.edu and we will manually pre-approve your request so that the registration will go through the next time you try it. Also, tell us when some good times are for someone from our office to visit you to join the Windows computers in your lab to the college’s AD domain.
  • Then let us know the name of your lab or center, and we can make a file share for it on the Network Appliance fileserver maintained by the College. It will be at the location \\ad\eng\research\eng_research_yourlabname (or /ad/eng/research/eng_research_yourlabname under Linux). Follow the instructions here: Mounting ENGNASto get to your own home directory or your lab directory.
  • To add and remove other people from your lab directory (as well as to give them administrative permissions to computers in your lab), we will create a couple of “security groups” which we will add your lab users to. Send us a list of the AD/Kerberos login names of whoever is should be in the “admins” group as well as whoever should be in the “users” group.
  • You can use these groups to set levels of access on various folders within your /ad/eng/research fileshare, following the instructions here: AD Permissions.

High-performance computing resources

SCC: BU’s Shared Computing Cluster is hosted in the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center by IS&T’s Research Computing Services (RCS) team. ENG-IT typically recommends researchers with high computing performance needs utilize this service, as it has direct access to ENG resources (ENGNAS storage & ENG software), contains up to date software, CPUs & GPUs, and is supported and maintained by a dedicated team. SCC resources are tiered between the free Shared tier, and a Buy-In tier, which your group or department may fund. For more information about the SCC, please reach out to enghelp@bu.edu, help@scc.bu.edu, or for general questions, rcs@bu.edu.

ENG-Grid is a flexible HPC resource that allows you to run computer jobs with your engineering account directly from your lab’s research share. You can use the shared queues or join your own Linux machines to the grid for private, highest-priority queue control. For usage instructions, see: Grid Instructions.

On-Premise Research Systems: While ENGIT typically recommends making use of the Shared Computing resources, we know that research groups and teaching faculty will often need on-premises systems for many different applications. If you are looking for systems that fit your group needs, please complete the Research Hardware Recommendation form, and ENGIT staff will coordinate with some of our preferred vendors (Dell, Lambda Labs, Silicon Mechanics, Lenovo, etc), to find the best system for your needs.