This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This project will renovate the Bi-State Optical Network (BiSON), a high-speed optical network comprised of fiber optic links that serves a collaboration of research and educational institutions in Colorado and Wyoming. BiSON links these institutions together and provides transport links to national networks such as Internet2, National LambdaRail and TeraGrid. Participants using the BiSON Network Services include Colorado State University, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-Boulder, the University of Colorado-Boulder, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, and the University of Wyoming.
The project will upgrade BiSON from a single 2Gbps ring to a dense wave-division multiplexing solution capable of supporting multiple lambdas. This will enable researchers to transport efficiently enormous amounts of data intra-BiSON and over the national wide-area network. This will facilitate access to high-end computational and data resources used by researchers at the institutions connected to BiSON, such as those at Department of Energy labs, TeraGrid, and NASA, as well as at the future NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center. The upgrade will also provide scientists the flexibility to obtain dedicated bandwidth for specific research applications.
Examples of research projects that will benefit from the regional networking renovation include: climate and atmospheric research with a particular focus on the role of clouds in climate change using very high-resolution global atmospheric modeling; high-energy physics research using the Compact Muon Solenoid at the Large Hadron Collider; Earth science such as extreme weather, boundary layer modeling, cloud physics, global ocean simulation, coastal oceanography, salt water turbulence, sunspots and solar flux eruptions, Sun-Earth interactions, computational science, computer science, data assimilation, and turbulence; research on wind energy resources.
In addition to providing infrastructure for research, the renovated network will be a resource that facilitates distance education and collaboration.
The Bi-State Optical Network (BiSON) is a high-speed optical network comprised of fiber optic links that serves a collaboration of research and educational institutions in Colorado and Wyoming. The purpose of BiSON is to provide its members robust, redundant access to regional and Wide Area Network (WAN) services. The Front Range GigaPoP (FRGP) participants using the BiSON Network Services include Colorado State University (CSU), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-Boulder (NOAA-Boulder), the University of Colorado-Boulder (CU-Boulder), the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), and the University of Wyoming (UW). BiSON is a valuable piece of cyberinfrastructure connecting researchers at participating organizations to multiple sources of observations and data throughout Colorado, Wyoming, and the broader community via interconnections with Internet2, National LambdaRail (NLR), and The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) (supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF)). BiSON also provides redundant, very high-speed connectivity for all FRGP participants to the recently completed NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne, Wyoming. NCAR recently announced that IBM will provide the inaugural supercomputing system for the NWSC. The new system, named Yellowstone, runs on an IBM iDataPlex. Yellowstone is expected to deliver 1.6 petaflops performance, or nearly 30 times the capacity of the system currently in use at NCAR’s Mesa Laboratory in Boulder, known as Bluefire. Petaflops refers to a machine’s ability to perform one quadrillion calculations, called floating point operations (FLOPS), per second. Scientists will use these advanced computing resources to understand complex processes in the atmosphere and throughout the Earth system, and to accelerate research into climate change, severe weather, geomagnetic storms, carbon sequestration, aviation safety, wildfires, and other critical geoscience topics. This proposal upgraded Bison’s current ADVA equipment from a single 2Gbps ring to a wave division multiplexing solution capable of supporting up to forty 10/40/100Gbps lambdas. Additional redundancy and resiliency were also provided by the upgrade. The resulting cyberinfrastructure is enabling scientists, educators, and researchers to much more efficiently transport enormous amounts of data intra-BiSON and over the WAN, collaborate with others in the community, access high-end resources such as the NWSC, XSEDE, Department of Energy (DOE) data and computing resources including Earth System Grid (ESG), and NASA. The project participants are scientific and educational leaders in atmospheric, oceanographic, space science, and energy alternatives. The concentration of these leaders in a geographically challenged part of the country makes BiSON a critical resource, and a relatively minimal investment has had an exponentially larger payoff in this proposal. The broader impacts of this proposal are that high-speed networking enables and enhances scientific research and discovery, distance education, and collaboration. This proposal very specifically enhanced the infrastructure for research and education, as it is a direct upgrade of that very infrastructure. The proposal also strengthens and solidifies the existing and very successful and fruitful regional BiSON partnership. The intellectual merit of this proposed activity enhances advanced scientific research in a broad range of disciplines across five major research and educational organizations. This project connects these organizations to "the world" via very high-speed networks. Detailed descriptions of science already enabled by this project are included in the final report to NSF.
