NSF Award
2018919
This project implements a high-performance research and education network architecture over the existing campus cyberinfrastructure (CI) at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. The project solves the performance bottleneck of the current campus core network and establishes new infrastructures enabling high-throughput data transfer with peer institutions and on-campus private wireless broadband service. The updated CI enables efficient and high-throughput data movement needed by fast-growing data-intensive research and education applications across broad academic domains on campus including Chemistry and Biochemistry, Physics, Engineering, Plant Biology, Statistics, Computer Science, etc. The project builds upon a strong partnership among campus information technology experts, networking faculties, and domain researchers. It also provides an exceptional opportunity to train the CI workforce. <br/><br/>The project includes three tasks: 1) enhance the campus core network by adding redundancy across 9 core locations with new routers and 10 Gbps links. The updates add the capacity and redundancy needed to offer reliable and high-performance network service to the whole campus; 2) establish a Science DMZ and the associated network performance monitoring framework, which enables researchers to obtain and share data with external hosts a high speed; and 3) establish a private LTE network dedicated to research and education over the 3.65 GHz CBRS spectrum. Five data-intensive science and education applications are prototyped to demonstrate the new CI capabilities and workflows enabled by this project.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
