Lab Work Station Upgrade

Project Title: Lab Work Station Upgrade

Project Lead’s Name: Skip Benamati

Email: benamajh@miamioh.edu

Please Choose the Primary Affiliation: FSB

Are There Other Project Team Members?: Yes

Other Project Team Member: Jerry Cruez

Other Team Member Email Address: cruezg@miamioh.edu

Brief description of project: To upgrade the capabilities of the machines in the 2037 lab in the FSB. The machines in this lab are well behind the machines in the other FSB lab, 2050. The 2037 machines have I5 vs I7 processors which are slower, 8Gb of memory vs 16 Gb in 2050, and traditional vs solid state drives compared to the 2050 machines. The project seeks funding to upgrade the 2037 machines to 16 G of memory and replace the current drives with solid state drives.

Does this project focus on graduate student education or graduate student life?: No

Describe the problem you are attempting to solve and your approach for solving that problem.: As our courses and student experiential projects continue to take on bigger data sets and attack more complex problems, the current machines have become a bottleneck to pedagogy in multiple ways. We simply cannot do what we need to in some of the classes that need to be taught in that lab. As mentioned above, the machines in the 2037 labs while only 2.5 years old are behind technically. We can squeeze more useful life out of them if we could upgrade the memory to 16 Gb and/or add solid state drives to make them quicker.

The criteria state that technology fee projects should benefit students in innovative and/or significant ways. How would you describe the innovation and/or significance of your project?: This lab is fully utilized for FSB courses. Assuming 12 sections per semester at 35 per class, this is 420 students per semester impacted by this upgrade. There are also open lab times in this lab in the evenings that serve these as well as many other students doing computer based assignments. The quicker, more capable machines will help these students as well.

How will you assess the project?: We will monitor the evening lab usage to get a count of the students using the lab. We will also keep track of issues in the lab that arise due to the capacity of the machines and look for that number of issues per semester to go down. Jerry Cruez's group will track these metrics.

Have you applied for and/or received Tech Fee awards in past years?: Yes

If funded, what results did you achieve?: We applied for and received partial funding for two different laptop carts for use in FSB classrooms by faculty. The utilization of these two carts has gone up steadily of the last 3 years to the point that contention for the carts is becoming a problem

Did you submit a final report?: Yes

What happens to the project in year two and beyond? Will there be any ongoing costs such as software or hardware maintenance, supplies, staffing, etc.? How will these be funded?: All of the future/ongoing costs will be the responsibility of the FSB.

Budget: Hardware

Hardware Title(s) & Vendor(s): FSB 2037 upgrade & CDWG

Hardware Costs: $14,592.05

What is the total budget amount requested?: $14,592.05

Comments:

  • Dell - DDR3L - 8 GB - SO-DIMM 204-pin
  • Memory 8GB * 2 = 16GB ram
  • We have 43 computer * 2 set of memory = QTY 86
  • Samsung 850 EVO MZ-75E500 - solid state drive - 500 GB - SATA 6Gb/s
  • QTY 43 computers