A diverse PI team including researchers and the Office of Information Technology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) is upgrading the campus network infrastructure to improve the ability for professors and students to perform, enhance, and expand R&D activities. This project complements other significant and ongoing investments/upgrades at UTC to enhance campus intra- and inter-networking and research computing cyberinfrastructure. UTC's growing research portfolio of faculty-driven, data-oriented research drives the network upgrades. 100Gbit/s fiber networking infrastructure, switching, and routing infrastructure are upgraded by this project. A Science DMZ infrastructure and Data Transfer Node (DTN) server, both components used for inter-campus collaborations and tuned for large-scale data transfers, support the emerging uses of big data and data-centric external collaborations.
The project upgrades networking to eight UTC campus buildings representing all four university colleges (Engineering & Computer Science, Arts & Sciences, The Gary W. Rollins College of Business, and the College of Health, Education, and Professional Studies), as well as the Multidisciplinary Research Building (MDRB) and the campus library. In these buildings, at least fourteen science drivers (projects) on campus benefit from the proposed infrastructure; several of the projects are either NSF funded or otherwise externally supported. The co-location of three research centers plus UTC's research computing facilities in the MDRB adds to the campus impact.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
