Proposal Number: EPS - 1006576 Institution: West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission Project Director: Paul L Hill
This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This award, "Enhancing Inter- and Intra-campus Cyberinfrastructure at West Virginia's Research Institutions," describes a project focused on advancing cyberinfrastructure (CI) to current research standards at West Virginia's (WV) two research universities, and enables Internet2 access potential for the state's predominantly undergraduate colleges and universities (PUIs), community and technical colleges (CTCs), and the K-12 community that participate on the State Network (WVNET) as a whole. This effort is expected to be primarily directed towards developing the inter-campus CI at Marshall University (MU), and upgrading the intra-campus CI at West Virginia University (WVU). The activities complement other investments by NSF, the state, and its research institutions and are aligned with the broad CI goals and specific objectives of the WV Statewide Science and Technology Strategic Plan for CI (Vision 2015: Cyberinfrastructure). Vision 2015 has been the driving force behind the successful expansion of academic research infrastructure in the state. The CI component of Vision 2015 encourages deployment of sustainable CI resources and focuses on expansion of advanced network infrastructure. Other goals include enhanced high-performance computing and data storage resources, inter-institutional collaboration tools, and deployment of advanced applications and tools that can be utilized by the research community.
Intellectual Merit With improved inter- and intra- campus connectivity, research and education endeavors will be greatly enhanced in the State of WV. The impact of improved connectivity would reach a diversity of disciplines ranging from bionanoscience, energy, neuroscience, and astrophysics to cancer therapy and gene mapping. CI improvements are planned to enable research and education in bionanoscience and engineering, neuroscience, computational fluid dynamics and applied multi-physics, multiscale modeling of energy resources, astrophysics, data mining and bioinformatics with biomedical data, and many other science disciplines. While coming from widely different disciplinary areas across science and engineering, all these topics share a series of common elements: very large data sets, complex computational systems, and interactive visualization needs. The proposed CI would provide all these investigators with powerful new capabilities for discoveries that generate a truly transformative setting. In addition to the direct and obvious benefits, there are subtler long-term impacts that result from the sharing of knowledge and common tools. They would lead to a community of shared research practice that empowers the participants in unexpected ways. These research areas and many others would benefit from this enhanced cyber capability. With these improvements to CI, researchers would be afforded new opportunities to compete for funding and resources currently out of reach because of WV's cyber-limitations.
Broader Impacts Enhanced CI through increased connectivity will improve the State's research infrastructure and human resource development through a comprehensive plan for integrating sustainable research, education and workforce development within the framework of WV's universities, PUIs, and CTCs and the State's citizenry. To realize revolutions in the processes of learning and discovery, new types of networked resources also demand a new level of technical competence. The project would have direct impact on students and the professional IT workforce at two research institutions and eight PUIs, and on the research capability for dozens of participating faculty and research students. By leveraging the NSF and state investments from the recent RII Track 2 award, campus champions of WVU, MU and West Virginia State University (WVSU) would become state champions for broadband technologies who will impact higher education, K-12 and economic development throughout the state.
RII Cyberinfrastructure 2 The Research Infrastructure Improvement Cyberinfrastructure 2 Award (RIIC2) is a $1,176,470 National Science Foundation grant to enhance cyberinfrastructure across West Virginia’s higher education system. The award provides faster connections and increased connectivity at both Marshall and West Virginia universities, which in turn improves internet access to institutions throughout West Virginia. Marshall University Marshall University’s participation as the lead agency and coordinator for the state to provide participation in the SEGP (Sponsored Education Group Participant) in Internet2 (I2) allows collectives of educational organizations such as universities, community colleges, K-12 schools, museums, healthcare facilities, and libraries access to the stable, high-bandwidth capabilities of Internet2 for educational projects that require advanced technologies. These entities are typically not eligible or are not able to become Internet2 members on their own. In April 2011, the West Virginia Internet2 Consortium for Sponsored Education Group Participants (SEGP), Marshall University, OARnet (The Ohio Academic and Research network, Columbus), and Internet2 signed an agreement that allowed West Virginia to be the 40th state to offer Internet2 memberships to eligible organizations through a shared membership. Under this agreement, Marshall University acts as sponsor and sole SEGP connector and OARnet serves as Internet2 connector. Delivery of this service is facilitated by WVNET, the West Virginia Network, to its member institutions which includes Higher Education institutions, K-12 schools, libraries, state and local governments, medical facilities, research facilities and others that meet the requirements of the Internet2. In May 2012, this agreement was modified in response to network enhancement initiatives at WVNET to add WVNET as an additional SEGP connector, and 3Rivers Optical Exchange-Pittsburgh to be an additional Internet2 connector, thus enhancing access and reliability to those same participants. Providing Internet2 as a SEGP service combines the efforts of colleges and universities with a K-12 initiative that will enable advanced technologies to be used in transformative ways. This will result in the development and use of advanced network applications, tools, services and content to enhance teaching and learning in ways that further the mission of elementary, secondary and postsecondary education in West Virginia. The West Virginia research community is bringing interested K-12 educators, community colleges, colleges and universities, libraries, museums and others to the table to share ideas, results, technology, and other information. Ideas are first shared on the closed Internet2 high bandwidth network to ensure a testing arena for ideas and applications and later deployed to the commodity Internet. This provides a better mechanism of enabling not just the research, technology and clinical communities, but also education, education research, arts and cultural communities to engage the opportunities of the new technologies. This also provides research specialists at major research institutions a method to truly collaborate with faculty and students. These enhanced capabilities have particular significance not only for expanding science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs, research initiatives and clinical outreach, but also bringing significant economic development opportunities to the region. West Virginia University At West Virginia University, the RIIC2 helped to fund an upgrade of WVU’s campus core network, supporting speeds of 10 gigabits per second using Cisco Systems’ new Cisco Nexus 7000 platform. The University’s network had previously supported one gigabit per second. This upgrade enhances WVU’s commitment and support for science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines, research and academics. A robust, reliable and secure network infrastructure that supports WVU’s expanding research and academic initiatives is a basic requirement. Improved computing power and infrastructure provides a platform for development of innovative scientific theories and knowledge by expanding areas of scholarly inquiry and collaboration. The move puts WVU on par with the top research institutions around the country and greatly benefits research efforts in national security, defense, nanoscale science, genomics-proteomics, energy, carbon capture and sequestration, climate change, healthcare, engineering and education. Besides the NSF, funding for the WVU portion of the project came from the WVU Provost, the WVU Research Corp., and a $500,000 equipment donation from Cisco Systems. The enhancement not only improves WVU’s computer backbone across campus, but solves specific challenges to managing research data. Having 10 gigabit capacity is particularly beneficial for the storage of historic engineering data and data from projects which typically consume a large portion of bandwidth, such as astrophysics records.
