The Southern Partnership in Advanced Networking (SPAN) supports the increasingly critical role that access to distributed data/compute-intensive infrastructure, both technical and human, is playing in research and education endeavors across a wide range of disciplines. As campus IT groups around the country build and expand infrastructure components to address the needs of their users, coordination between and across campuses has become critical to create successful, sustainable, scalable, and flexible solutions that can be implemented in multiple settings. Tying this infrastructure together is the network, which has become an essential piece of the cyberinfrastructure ecosystem.
SPAN is a partnership between Clemson University, South Carolina State University, Georgia State University, and the University of Georgia that is building a regional community of practitioners across the South that supports next-generation networking. In collaboration with the Southern Crossroads initiative, Internet2, and ESnet, SPAN offers a program of workshops, site visits, and best practices documentation to administrators, campus IT groups, and researchers at institutions across the South that includes hands-on training, expert presentations, and in situ recommendations on topics such as network upgrades and cybersecurity to assist in the development and deployment of their own Campus Cyberinfrastructure Plans.
Significantly, SPAN facilitates the creation of distributed science communities and enables new collaborations that can leverage advanced networking solutions to make new science discoveries. The creation of this regional network of expertise distributed across multiple institutions in support of faculty-led research that benefits from advanced networking capabilities will transform the way research is done across the region.
