CITADel - CyberInfrastructure Technology Advancement for Delaware

University Of Delaware, Newark DE

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The project will renovate the campus network infrastructure and the wide-area network connection at the University of Delaware. This includes adding a second external connection point to the campus network, improving external network capacity, providing higher-bandwidth connectivity, providing the capability to use dynamic network circuits, and upgrading campus network devices to enable the ability to provide multiple 10-Gbp/s connections from research centers and groups to the campus backbone. The renovation will enhance research in a number of fields of research pursued at the University of Delaware, including: astronomy and space physics, catalysis and energy research, critical zone studies in oceanography and marine biology, bioinformatics, genomics, protein modeling, and computer science research on networks. Examples of specific projects that will be affected include: the analysis of data from the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) that scans the night sky for remnants of exploded stars, distant active galaxies, powerful gamma-ray bursts, and evidence of dark matter particles; conducting cosmic ray science using the IceCube neutrino detector; archiving, analysis and visualization of the output from hydrodynamic and magnetohydrodynamic turbulence simulations; studies of hydrological and coastal resources, wetlands, and land resources using data from remote sensing platforms; studies of deep-water convection in the North-Atlantic Ocean; multiscale modeling of nanomaterials to help develop innovative catalytic technologies for efficient conversion of biomass into chemicals, electricity, and fuels; network performance in distributed computing; future support of the Protein Information Resource, a public bioinformatics resource that supports genomic, proteomic and systems biology research and scientific studies; the use of remote supercomputing facilities for bioinformatics research; and research in plant functional genomics in collaboration with partners in other north-eastern EPSCoR states. In addition to providing infrastructure for research, the renovation will enhance access to dynamic network and computing resources for graduate research training and education. Research seminars and technical courses feature projects that make use of computing resources. The network renovation will allow such users to exploit the current trends of virtualization so that computing work is no longer tied to a particular lab or group of systems. The University will use the enhanced network connectivity to make its computational and network resources available, for education and research, to other four- and two-year colleges in Delaware.