This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The project will improve the structure of the Northern Tier Network (NTN) by linking North Dakota and South Dakota's NTN segments (NTN-ND and NTN-SD). NTN is a regional optical research and education network connecting institutions in thirteen states across the northwestern U.S. Connecting the South Dakota and North Dakota networks involves, acquiring a 20-year Indefeasible Right of Use (IRU) to dark fiber between NTN-ND and NTN-SD, acquiring the necessary equipment to light the new fiber between NTN-ND and NTN-SD, and upgrading NTN-SD's equipment in Aberdeen, SD where the connection to the South Dakota network is made.
Some examples of research activities that are likely to benefit from the network connection are: high-energy physics research, when the planned Dakota Ion Accelerators for Nuclear Astrophysics and Long-Baseline Neutrino Program experiments come on line; work on improving the information content of satellite imagery involving collaborations between South Dakota State University, Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and the Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Data Center in Sioux Falls, SD, along with commercial satellite imaging companies located around the world; environmental science research in the Dakotas and elsewhere in the United States that takes advantage of network access to the remotely sensed images of the Earth's surface archived in the EROS Data Center; and real-time predictive modeling of drought, rainfall, and hail.
Laboratories at higher education sites in South Dakota, nationally and internationally provide student research training and mentoring activities for students across a variety of disciplines that exploit network access to large data archives or supercomputing resources around the United States, including the EROS Data Center in South Dakota. In addition, the new network connection will enable scientists in South Dakota to exploit more effectively the scanning electron microscope located at North Dakota State University.
Efforts to provide connectivity to the nation’s high-speed research and education (R&E) network backbone for universities between Chicago and Seattle have been underway since the mid-1990’s. The funds provided through this grant enable the Northern Tier Network (NTN), which spans 12 member states, to serve as an upper Midwest crossroads for international R&E high-speed Internet traffic, providing both redundancy and increased bandwidth critical for research and academic activities. Successful completion of this project has resulted in connecting the NTN-South Dakota (NTN-SD) to NTN’s Point of Presence in Fargo, North Dakota with a network segment with 10 waves (lambdas) of 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) and an additional 10 (10 Gbps) waves between North Dakota and the University of Minnesota to handle the additional traffic resulting from this enhancement. Scientific Impacts Real-time predictive modeling of drought, rainfall and hail: The connection between the SD network and the NTN enables access by scientists to the large spectrum of data collected by the Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center in Sioux Falls SD. Research findings related to this topic include scaling predictions for crops based on real-time data, remote sensing data providing a source of spatially distributed information, and numerical weather prediction models based on data obtained from remote sensors onboard polar orbiting satellites. How the national R&E network performs when used by scientists to access data repositories at EROS and USGS sites: The United States Geological Survey (USGS) and EROS find their work increasingly dependent on a reliable and redundant global cyberinfrastructure consisting of high-capacity fiber networks capable of supporting data transit critical to daily functions in business, industry and civil services. Leveraging its access to the U.S. national R&E backbone through South Dakota’s Research Education and Economic Development (REED) network, EROS’ partnership with the NTN is critical in its ability to help others conduct research. To illustrate the value of this relationship, as of 2013 EROS has distributed 2.3 petabytes (PB) of earth science data for each of the last two years to researchers in China, Russia, Japan, Korea, and to support Google’s Earth Engine. An additional 3.5 million Landsat scenes are distributed annually to users around the globe. Currently, the top high-volume downloads on a monthly basis include Google, the European IP Networks (RIPE) and Asia-Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC). http://eros.usgs.gov Graphic: Top 20 countries downloading EROS data in November and December 2012. Regional higher education institutions and research sites provide examples of how EROS data is utilized. The South Dakota State University (SDSU) Image Processing Laboratory works extensively with the EROS Data Center and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD in the area of radiometric calibration of satellite imagery. The Global Web-Enabled Landsat Data (WELD) project provides evidence of how a multitude of science data is collected, analyzed, and then made available to researchers. The network path established through this grant enables significant additional capacity between USGS EROS and NASA Ames Research Center enabling transfer of large volumes of standard Level-1T Landsat products to NASA Ames for processing on the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) supercomputing facility. Research that involves use of remote access to North Dakota State University’s (NDSU) scanning electron microscope (SEM) by scientists in South Dakota. The Electron Microscopy Center at NDSU facilitates research by providing comprehensive services from project inception to publishable photographs for light and electron microscopy, imaging, and micro-computed tomography. The center also provides access to remote instrumentation of the SEM. Current collaborations include Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) use by the University of South Dakota and SDSU for research in bioengineering and immunolabeling. www.ndsu.edu/em_lab/ Current remote access to research instruments at other institutions in South Dakota include the transmission electron microscope laboratory at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology supporting research projects at the Vin?a Institute of Nuclear Sciences involving structural characterization of optoelectronic nanomaterials. Transmission Electron Microscopic studies at the University of South Dakota include research on noble metal containing titanium dioxide aerogels. Broader Impacts Outreach events aimed at K-12 classrooms: A Dakota’s K12 Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Initiative is scheduled to pilot its first series of STEM-based videoconference sessions for K-12 schools across the two states in 2014. Activities will provide professional development for teachers, followed by videoconference sessions for K-12 classrooms where students will have the opportunity to interact with scientists and engage in current science research topics. Curriculum resources will be available online for use during and after the series. STEM topics will include dark matter and neutrinos, remote access to scanning electron microscopes, citizen science activities supporting research, and training in the use of Geographic Information Systems/Landsat imagery. Traffic statistics for the new network link over the last 20 months.
