Industries — Education & Research

Campus cloud for research and teaching

Give researchers and students on-demand access to compute resources. Lab environments in minutes, GPU clusters for ML research, and per-department cost tracking — all self-service.

The Problem

Campus IT bottlenecks

University IT teams are overwhelmed. Manual provisioning, GPU contention, and zero cost visibility create friction for researchers and students alike.

Limited IT Staff

University IT teams are stretched thin. Managing infrastructure for dozens of departments, hundreds of courses, and thousands of students with a team of 3-5 engineers is unsustainable.

Lab Setup Takes Weeks

Setting up per-course lab environments manually takes 2-4 weeks. By the time infrastructure is ready, the semester is already in progress and students have lost valuable lab time.

GPU Access Bottleneck

Research groups compete for limited GPU resources with no scheduling or fair-share system. Priority is determined by who emails IT first, not by research urgency or grant deadlines.

No Cost Tracking Per Department

Infrastructure costs are charged to a central IT budget. Departments have no visibility into their consumption, creating waste and making grant-based cost allocation impossible.

The Solution

How PLATFORMA helps

A campus cloud platform that gives faculty and researchers self-service access to compute, storage, and GPU resources — with zero IT tickets.

Self-Service Lab Environments

Professors create lab templates once. At the start of each semester, 200 identical student VMs are provisioned in minutes — preconfigured with the right OS, tools, and datasets. Students get SSH credentials on day one.

GPU Cluster Scheduling

Fair-share GPU scheduling across research groups. Set quotas per lab, per project, and per researcher. Priority queues for grant-funded work. Real-time visibility into GPU utilization and queue status.

Academic Pricing & Grants

Track compute costs per department, per course, and per research grant. Automated monthly reports for grant compliance. Per-student cost allocation for course budgets.

LDAP/SAML Authentication

Integrate with your university identity provider. Students and faculty log in with their existing university credentials. Automatic role assignment based on enrollment — students, TAs, professors, researchers.

Research Collaboration

Shared project workspaces where research teams collaborate on datasets, notebooks, and compute resources. Cross-department projects with isolated but shareable infrastructure.

Template Library

Pre-built environment templates for common courses — Python data science, Java programming, ML/AI with GPU, network security labs. Faculty customize and deploy without IT involvement.

Use Cases

Real-world scenarios

How universities are using PLATFORMA to transform campus computing for teaching and research.

CS Department Provisions 200 Student VMs

A computer science department provisions 200 identical lab VMs for an introductory programming course in under 10 minutes. Each student gets a personal VM with pre-installed IDEs, compilers, and datasets. At semester end, VMs are automatically deprovisioned.

200 VMs provisioned in minutes
Per-student resource quotas enforced
Automatic cleanup at semester end

Research Lab Gets GPU Cluster

A machine learning research lab requests a GPU cluster for a grant-funded project. PLATFORMA provisions 8 A100 GPUs with Jupyter notebooks, shared storage, and per-experiment cost tracking — ready for training within the hour.

GPU cluster provisioned same day
Per-experiment cost tracking for grants
Shared storage for datasets and models

University Tracks Costs Per Faculty

A university implements per-faculty cost tracking for the first time. Within one semester, total infrastructure spend drops 30% as departments optimize resource usage now that costs are visible and attributed to their budgets.

Per-faculty cost visibility and chargeback
30% reduction in infrastructure waste
Automated grant compliance reporting
By the Numbers

Campus cloud at scale

What universities achieve with PLATFORMA campus cloud.

200+

VMs in minutes

Per-course lab provisioning

Per

Student quotas

Fair resource allocation

GPU

Scheduling

Fair-share across research

Grant

Based billing

Automated cost compliance

For Education

Ready to modernize campus computing?

Give your researchers and students the compute resources they need — self-service, on-demand, with per-department cost tracking.

FAQ

Common Questions

The platform integrates with standard LDAP/LDAPS and SAML 2.0 identity providers. Users authenticate with their university credentials. Groups (e.g., enrolled students in CS101, faculty, research lab members) automatically map to platform roles and resource quotas. When a student drops a course, their access is automatically revoked.

You define resource quotas per course, per student role, and per department. For example, CS101 students might get 2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, and 20GB storage each, while ML research students get 8 vCPU, 32GB RAM, and 100GB storage. Quotas are enforced at provisioning time — students cannot exceed their allocation.

GPU resources are managed through a fair-share scheduling system. Each research group gets a guaranteed minimum allocation based on their quota. Unused GPU capacity is dynamically reallocated to groups with pending jobs. Priority queues allow grant-funded research to get faster access. Real-time dashboards show utilization and queue status.

Yes. We offer special academic pricing for universities and research institutions. The pricing model is designed for educational use — per-student pricing for course environments and per-GPU-hour pricing for research workloads. Contact our education team for a custom quote based on your institution size and requirements.