Renovating Mid-Atlantic Crossroads Network Facilities

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This project is a renovation of Research and Education metro network facilities operated by the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX), augmenting current 10 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) optical transport and Ethernet switch capabilities with 100Gb/s technology. MAX proposes to procure three dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM) systems with 100Gb/s transponders. Two will link nodes in McLean, Virginia and College Park, Maryland to a 100 Gigabit Ethernet switch at the Next Generation Internet eXchange-East facility. The third will initially be setup and configured for testing in the MAX machine room laboratory. Once an additional pair of fibers has been built out between College Park and Baltimore in early 2011, this node will be installed in a Baltimore Point of Presence in support of the research and education efforts of institutions in the Baltimore area. The project will provide infrastructure support for network research and for large-scale, data-intensive research activities. The latter projects either generate large amounts of data, aggregate large amounts of data, or integrate data from diverse sources. Examples of research fields affected include Earth and environmental science, transportation, linguistics, various computer science topics such as networking, imaging, data curation, and visualization, computational public health epidemiology, and computational research in areas such as computational fluid dynamics, simulations of materials properties, fluid-structure interactions in complex biological systems, direct and large-eddy simulations of turbulence, aero-acoustics, combustion, reacting flows, micro-fluidics, and thermodynamic modeling. By providing infrastructure for research, the project will enable undergraduate and graduate faculty in the region to strengthen and expand their collaborations with colleagues throughout the region, and the world, on cutting-edge research and education projects.