Villanova University – Campus CyberInfrastructure Plan - 2021

The Villanova University (VU) 2020-2030 Strategic Plan [1] highlights the commitment to advance research and student engagement with scholarship activities. The strategic plan includes investments in research infrastructure that will improve administrative support and research computing services. This Villanova Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Plan further supports the research goals of the university. Specifically, the proposed HPC cluster is a key component of VU’s robust research computing infrastructure and will significantly advance current and future research.

Villanova’s CI plan has these significant priorities:

(1)            Create a secure, segmented network that can be configured to ensure end-to-end performance and support data transfer requirements.

(2)            Implement two perfSONAR nodes to ensure network performance.

(3)            Expand our current College of Engineering (COE) and College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (CLAS) research computing facilities with the proposed HPC resource to support all researchers on campus and provide greater access to compute resources off-site.

(4)            Develop a central model for administering research computing resources to ensure reliability, accessibility, and efficiency.

(5)            Provide students with access to research infrastructure in support of Villanova’s commitment to offering high-impact student research opportunities. 

(6)            Continue investment in the security of our cyberinfrastructure with appropriate controls for critical resources. Implement network segmentation to mitigate risk.

(7)            Enhance the Villanova relationship with InCommon to provide identity authorization as an InCommon federated entity and meet the Baseline Expectations for Trust in Federation and Research and Scholarship Entity category specifications.

(8)            Villanova is a member of the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) and meets the recommended best practices.