This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The project will renovate the regional research and education network facilities operated by the Three Rivers Optical Exchange (3ROX), a small regional network serving research institutions in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. 3ROX connects the campus networks of the major universities in the region, as well as educational organizations such as local colleges, school districts and museums. Current 3ROX participants include Carnegie Mellon University, the Pennsylvania State University, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, the University of Pittsburgh, Waynesburg University and West Virginia University, as well as intermediate units serving a total of 188 school districts in western and central Pennsylvania, including the Pittsburgh Public School District.
3ROX will expand the existing optical network to support up to 40 separate waves and will incorporate an additional node into the existing three-node ring. The renovation will enable 3ROX to support the use of 100 Gigabit Ethernet circuits and make waves and virtual circuits available on request to research projects that have a temporary need for them. The renovation includes the enhancement of the existing management control plane and installation of a router capable of supporting 100 Gigabit Ethernet connections to the wider R&E network. These enhancements will enable users that connect to 3ROX to take advantage of the more advanced services being provided by the national backbone research and education networks.
Some examples of research activities that are likely to benefit from the network connection are: high-energy physics research, including detector development for the Large Hadron Collider, the development of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project, molecular and materials simulation, seismology and earthquake engineering, and numerous projects that use the storage and computation capabilities of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Also benefiting will be those computer scientists in the universities served by 3ROX who use national and international virtual network research test beds such as PlanetLab, OpenFlow and Emulab. New activities that will benefit from these upgrades include faster and more reliable access to large scientific datasets, major computer science research initiatives such as GENI and research on new network protocols and control technologies.
Additional impacts of the 3ROX regional network include: the provision of local, regional and national research and education connectivity to over 188 school districts in western and central Pennsylvania, containing over 800 individual schools with almost 400,000 students and 28,000 teachers; the distribution over the network, to K-12 schools, of software modules authored at the National Resource for Biomedical Supercomputing that dynamically illustrate commonly taught concepts and images from static textbooks and include computer simulations that address these concepts on a quantitative level; the provision of network access to external science, engineering and technology resources for the Pittsburgh Science and Technology Academy, a recently-opened, special focus school within the Pittsburgh Public School System that is dedicated to students who are interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics; and a program entitled Computation and Science for Teachers for high school science teachers in western Pennsylvania to prepare them to become leaders in the effective use of modeling and simulation tools in the classroom.
