Frequently Asked Questions
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Each of the components of NCShare provides valuable resources to North Carolina’s smaller and minority-serving institutions of higher learning.
- The Science DMZ lowers the costs for institutions through enhanced research productivity and collaboration, fast and unrestricted data movement and reduced time required for scientific discoveries. Think of it like a busy highway during your daily commute. When you send data through traditional networks, your data shares the road with other vehicles and slowing down traffic. When you send your data through a Science DMZ your information gets to use a dedicated high-speed lane. See ‘What is a DMZ’ video
- The Compute as a Service (CaaS) platform allows for the setup of one shared computing environment that bypasses the complex package installation issues that we’ve grown accustomed to, such as having to configure software on each student or lab technician’s computer. Troubleshooting, updates, changes throughout the system, and more can be done once instead of at each user’s computer. It also standardizes the technology environments to factor in a variety of access to resources. In other words, users can use their preferred hardware, do not have to share computers, and they can access NCShare from anywhere.
NCShare also benefits from the collaboration of all the institutions who participate. You can easily share data and best practices with other NCShare users, and in this way we are able to crowdsource software solutions rather than each developing and deploying them separately.
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Yes. Instructors and researchers who are sharing and collaborating on data with other institutions, especially large data, will benefit. Additionally, participating in NCShare will save you time – less troubleshooting technical issues, more focus on your research or instruction.
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With NCShare, technology gets out of the way and you can focus on your learning or research environment. New discoveries and learning exercises can happen faster and with ease with little to no troubleshooting from the faculty/instructor/researcher.
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There is no cost to use NCShare. Today, NCShare is operated by MCNC on the MCNC state-wide fiber network.
The NCShare environment was established with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF OAC #2018401, NSF OAC #2201525, NSF OAC #2201105). Those NSF awards fund NCShare operations (i.e., its hardware) for about two more years, at which time we expect to seek further NSF funding to further upgrade and further grow the environment, based on what we hope will be broad adoption and high demand across North Carolina.
In the future it is possible that small usage fees may be introduced, but planning is still underway for the sustained NCShare operation.
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We recommend allowing up to a month to be operational in your environment.
- If it’s the first time your institution connects to NCShare: In order to simplify the user experience, we leverage federated access to allow your students/researchers/faculty to use your university’s login credentials to access NCShare services. This can take several weeks.
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You should plan to do your own testing and work to ensure the environment you need is set up correctly. This can take as little as a week, but some users prefer longer. Keep in mind that if you run into an issue and need help, support is subject to an academic schedule with busy, high-frequency periods during the academic year (i.e. first week of classes, final exams, etc.)
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Not all of the system support has to come from your institution. NCShare has a network of users and can provide institutional support. However, our current users have found it helpful to have an identified local IT Support point person and academic instruction support. Specifically, it helps for your IT support to have an expertise in containerized computing and a working knowledge of LINUX and Docker. If they do not have this expertise, NCShare can organize a bootcamp among local technical personnel to help develop that expertise. Review our technical documentation, which is routinely updated, for self-guided help.
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Your participation keeps the network going. NCShare is supported by a community of participating institutions. The grant ending will not affect NCShare’s offering. It will still be here and all operational decisions will be made by participating institutions, together with MCNC as the initial service provider for NCShare.
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Yes. Send an email to info@ncshare.org to gain access to test the system.
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When you begin using NCShare, you will be authorized to send emails to our support email address. It is supported by several technical advisors would will respond to your question.