CC*DNI Network Infrastructure: Indiana University Regional Campus Network Infrastructure to Support Scientific Research and Education

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

Indiana University's regional campuses enroll over 30,000 students each year, addressing the need to provide higher education opportunities to citizens of Indiana who for various reasons are unable to enroll at IU's core campuses in Bloomington and Indianapolis. These students are often non-traditional and/or first generation college students. The resources needed to provide high-quality scientific research and educational opportunities are concentrated at IUís Bloomington and Indianapolis core campuses. High-performance and high-speed data networks are required to support transfer of large data sets and access to national scientific resource for each of IU's regional campuses. This project improves the campus cyberinfrastructure at Indiana Universityís five regional campuses and one center in three areas to support unmet research needs: 1) it increases IU regional campusesí connection to Internet2 and other national research networks from 1Gbps to 10Gbps via Indiana's regional network provider, I-Light; 2) it increases the connection speed from IUís network core to the IU regional campuses to 10Gbps; and 3) the installed Data Transfer Nodes at the five larger regional campuses ensures unimpeded 10Gbps-capable high-performance data transfer for researchers across the regional and national research networks. These infrastructure improvements significantly benefit all researchers and students in STEM disciplines at Indiana University regional campuses. They address immediate research needs for projects in physics, geology, chemistry, biochemistry, and biology, including work at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL). Further, they enable future regional research projects heretofore impossible due to slow data transfer rates, thereby forwarding the advancement of science.