NSF Award
1541307
Science education at Franklin & Marshall College prioritizes student-faculty research led by highly accomplished scholar-teachers. In embracing that role within the context of projects that increasingly involve large amounts of shared data, present local network infrastructure limitations emerge when such transfers compete with other campus network traffic and pass through campus firewalls. This project creates a local area network optimized for high-performance scientific applications, a Science DMZ, which will be architected with particular attention paid to identifying and sharing replicable techniques, while ensuring institutional information security requirements are not compromised. The addition of a local data transfer node, combined with increased local network capacity, improves Franklin & Marshall's ability to exchange data with researchers at universities worldwide.<br/><br/>This project expands end-to-end performance monitoring, improves inter-institutional data exchange capabilities, and strengthens current and future research support for faculty via collaboration with a Pennsylvania-wide education and research computing network (KINBER). The network infrastructure improvements also enable new experimentation with off-site high performance computing solutions that cannot presently be evaluated due to infrastructure constraints. This project prepares undergraduate students for postgraduate work and study in data-intensive fields. Franklin & Marshall plans to share the results of the project with similar-sized institutions seeking to support their faculty and undergraduate researchers.
