Benefits of Membership

CAC members are afforded access to leading-edge research and development results in cloud and autonomic computing and to knowledge accumulated by academic researchers and other industry partners.

Benefits of membership include:

• Collaboration with faculty, graduate and undergraudate students, research scientits and other center partners.
• Choice of project topics to be funded by members' own contributions.
• Formal periodic project reviews along with continuous informal interaction and timely access to reports, papers and intellectual property generated by the center.
• Access to unique world-class equipment, facilities, and other CAC infrastructure.
• Recruitment opportunities among excellent graduate and undergraudate students.
• Leveraging of investments, projects and activities by all CAC members.
• Spin-off initiatives leading to new partnerships, customers or teaming for competitive proposals to funded programs.

Projects and Partnerships

Research partnerships and projects through the CAC provide:

• Expertise and partnerships in advancing technology while identifying and ameliorating risk factors.
• Customized recommendations for current and emerging cloud solutions, software, and methods.
• Expertise in a wide spectrum of high performance computing, grid and cloud services, and techniques to help industry serve multiple markets in their product line.
• Experience in medium and large-scale pre-competitive research that supports translation of ideas into business value and commercializable products.
• Assistance in the design of cloud service agreements and service-level agreements, including technological and legal implications required for use in cloud management.
• A trained workforce that can sustain opportunities created through the industry-research partnerships.

Facilities

The High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) at Texas Tech University supports the CAC as follows:

• Maintains memberships and strong working relationships with domestic and international cloud standards bodies, government entities, and working groups that coordinate future directions of cloud services.
• Provides experience in creating and managing high performance computing and Grid frameworks that span local, regional, and national scales.
• Conducts research in future computing capabilities that dramatically increase novel computational research and opportunities in scientific innovations.
• Coordinates disciplinary and interdisciplinary research engagements and industry partnerships to identify, foster, and develop new research and educational opportunities.
• Stays abreast with new computing, storage, and visualization technologies and their scope and impact in scientific computing.
• Collaborates with campus researchers, students, and other projects and programs to create a skilled IT workforce that could connect domain sciences and computing capabilities.

Join Now

Now that you have seen some of the benefits that can accrue to your organization through affiliation with the CAC, take the next steps toward membership: Membership Agreement.

Become a Member

An annual membership fee allows industry partners to reap the benefits of CAC’s full research program. CAC members from industry and government collaborate with and advise researchers to create a diverse, industry-relevant program that spans many different areas of work. Terms of membership are governed by a simple Center-wide membership agreement and associated bylaws through which activities are directed by the members themselves by direct participation on an advisory board that selects projects and activities of the Center.

Joining is as simple as filling out the Membership Agreement, selecting the desired amount of membership and any auxiliary research you may want to pursue, and contacting us to send it in.

To learn more about how to become a member, please send an email to cac.info@ttu.edu or contact the leadership team as listed on the Leadership page.

Membership Fees

Per calendar year:

• Base membership: $50,000/year - $99,999/year
• Executive membership: $100,000/year or more

All details for payment and terms are spelled out in the Membership Agreement. Please contact us if you may need further information.

More Information on Center Funding

Joining the Center puts you on the Industry Advisory Board (IAB) for the entire Center, which selects and approves research projects. Members who join at the Executive level are allowed twice the number of votes.

Per National Science Foundation IUCRC program guidelines, industry and government contributions in the form of annual CAC memberships, coupled with baseline funds from NSF and university matching funds, directly support the Center’s expenses for personnel, equipment, travel, and supplies. A base membership is the minimum for voting.

Memberships funds go directly to support the Center’s students, researchers and faculty for research and development activities. Additionally, the National Science Foundation and university provide funds and cost sharing to pay for administrative costs of operation, ensuring that these costs are covered separately and do not have to come out of membership fees.

The work of the Center is carried out in the form of projects. Project selection is done by the IAB through a voting process. Projects can be funded through a single membership, but joint projects are encouraged by combining votes from multiple members to support projects with budgets that exceed individual membership amounts. Additional funding beyond memberships may also be supplied by member companies or organizations to speed up selected research.

For special projects, it is also possible for any Center member to request to negotiate private research on a one-on-one basis beyond the projects funded by the membership fees. This opportunity is only available to member companies or organizations in good standing with existing memberships in the Center.

Each regular membership is leveraged by the combined number of Center memberships, therefore multiplying its total value by a large factor. With present membership levels, for example, a single membership represents only a few percent of the total projected annual budget of the CAC, but yields access to the full range of Center activities, thus producing a research program at modest cost to your organization that would be much more expensive to pursue on your own using only internal resources.

You also gain access to the state-of-the-art facilities and software environment provided by the Center, which is fully up to date with current best practices and would be much more expensive for your organization to produce on its own. Thus membership in the CAC represents extraordinary value that will accelerate your organization's progress towards its defined goals.