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The NSF May be Measuring Your Institution’s Computing Power
8/3/2005
Almost exactly two years ago I wrote about a forthcoming survey by the National Science Foundation (NSF) which is a biannual event that historically measures research space on college campuses. In 2003 the NSF added an entire section to measure networking capacity and I anticipated that IT folks on campus would be surprised by the request to provide data that had not previously been asked for.
I really don’t know how “surprised” anyone was, but to my surprise, a considerable number of institutions did in fact find the time to collect and share their data with NSF. Four-hundred and sixty-five institutions responded to the survey. Of those, only a tiny handful did not also provide network data. I’ll summarize here a little bit of the early findings.
You may not know that precision measurement of the ‘Net Assignable Square Feet’ (NASF) of space devoted to research is a key part of the formula by which universities pull out the “administrative overhead” dollars from the research grants received by their faculty. Institutions are naturally very sensitive about this data and the NSF was quite concerned that in 2003 there would be less participation because for the first time ever, it is publishing the actual raw data publicly. There was a slight decline in participation when compared to previous biannual surveys, but not much, so the dataset is large enough to be useful.
With respect to the networking data, here is a sample table that was produced for the initial web report, titled Universities Continue to Expand Their Research Space with the Largest Increase Since 1988; Data Reported for Networking Capacity. Note that for space data, institutions were only asked about their research space but for network data the questions were intended to elicit data for all networking and information technology, whether used for research or not.
As with all of the tables in the initial report, an Excel file of the source data for the table is also published here. Further, individual institution data will be available from the Integrated Science and Engineering Resources Data System, and a large set of additional, detailed statistical tables with supporting data will eventually be available on the NSF website.
So, what can we learn from the initial reporting?
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