This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The project, proposed by the regional optical network, Pacific Northwest Gigapop, will replace an ad hoc system of connections to a tier of states in the northwestern United States with a fiber-based network capable of supporting multiple gigabit connections and extending from Seattle through Minneapolis to Chicago. It will upgrade connection points that various campuses en route will be able to connect to. These add/drop points are located at Yakima, Spokane, Missoula, Bozeman, Billings, and Fargo. The partners and campuses affected include the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP (PNWGP), the University of Washington, Heritage University, Washington State University, University of Idaho, University of Montana, Montana State University, North Dakota State University, the University of Minnesota, and the Starlight facility. The renovation also includes an optical switch at a PNWGP location in Seattle that will enable advanced networking research.
This project will enable researchers to transport efficiently large amounts of data between institutions in the north-western U.S. and over the national wide-area network. This will facilitate access to high-end computational and data resources used by researchers at north-western institutions. The upgrade will also provide scientists some flexibility to obtain dedicated bandwidth for specific research applications and will allow higher bandwidth connections to international research networks.
Examples of research areas that will benefit from the regional networking renovation include: astronomy, high-energy physics, the history and three-dimensional geometry and kinematics of active and ancient orogenic belts, solar physics, biologically-inspired nano-materials, computational biology, and investigations of the material properties of seashells.
In addition to providing infrastructure for research, the renovated network will be a resource that facilitates distance education and collaboration.
Enabling Inclusive Western States NSF Research via Next Generation Networking – the "Northern Tier Research Network" "Wide area," regional, national and international high performance networking has become the foundational and logistical system for much of modern science and research. These networks enable effective participation in research collaborations; access to data and computational resources, related specialized tools and models, and access to and control of remote sensors and robotics. Lack of access to these networks by any given institution can undermine access by colleagues, students, corporate entities and the public to research results or sharable data, and even inhibit research at these universities from flourishing. Successful completion of this initiative alleviates potential digital divides in states and institutions in rural areas along roughly 2000 fiber route miles between Seattle, WA and Minneapolis, MN, where network improvements have resulted in the completion of Northern Wave (NW) on the Northern Tier Network (NTN). Specific objectives for this initiative are to improve the current network capacity connecting research institutions along the NTN through deployment of an optical switch that allows NTN institutions access to wavelengths that can be switched in Seattle; upgrades to the router at the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) in Seattle to support the upgraded connectivity; and securing the remaining 10Gbps wave between Seattle and Chicago along the NTN, equipping it to support 10 gigabit connections. Scientific Impacts The Virtual Observatory and Ecological Informatics System (VOEIS – "voice") is a collaborative project funded by the National Science Foundation for the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research jurisdictions of Montana and Kentucky with partners from industry and the public sector. Collaborators are developing an integrated sensor and ecological informatics system using research-based lines of inquiry and an informatics framework that manages workflow from streaming sensor data to the application of those data in simulation models and visualizations. VOEIS will provide storage of Big Sky watershed, Flathead and Hancock Lakes, monitoring data with over 100 million records across the system. Development and support of the VOEIS DataHub software and API’s (http://voeis.msu.montana.edu) is ongoing. Over the last year Montana State University has improved the functionality and performance of the VOEIS DataHub and its ability to integrate with user websites and tools. Research enabled by use of the expanded network includes use of the VOEIS data hub as a centralized tool for ecological research laboratory data, development of a simulation environment for integrating empirical and computational investigations of system-level complexity, and incorporating Representational State Transfer (RESTful) architecture and an extensible data model in VOIES for data management. Geospatial applications of weather in agriculture. The Global Web-Enabled Landsat Data (WELD) project http://globalmonitoring.sdstate.edu/projects/weldglobal/ is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and provides evidence of how a multitude of science data is collected, analyzed and made available for further research and discovery. The network path established through this grant enables significant additional capacity between United States Geological Survey’s (USGS) Earth Resources Observations and Science (EROS) Center and NASA’s 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. Monthly and annual global 30 meter Landsat temporal composites are created and then transferred back to EROS for distribution. The value of the WELD products is that they are geographically referenced to a consistent projection, grid and tiling system, composited to minimize cloud contamination, and radiometrically normalized. The WELD products readily lend themselves to the generation of numerous spectral indices used to characterize landscape condition and derive geophysical and biophysical parameters. The WELD products will be developed for six epochs at five-year increments spanning 1985-2010. The design of high-performance biomimetic nanocomposites based on nacre. Based at North Dakota State University (NDSU), the Katti research group extensively uses high performance computing platforms on the XCEDE/TeraGrid and NDSU’s Center for Computationally Assisted Science and Technology platforms for their research. Specific research areas are benefitting from the NW resources: multiscale modeling of human bone, living-nonliving constructs in tissue engineering, swelling clays, diffusion in polymer clay nanocomposites, and computational studies on the molecular interactions between portions of collagen molecule, organics and various minerals in the oil shale and plant DNA -nanoparticle interactions. Broader Impacts The number of direct, bilateral peering relationships facilitated by PNWGP (and which were not previously available) for research collaborations include: Metropolitan Research and Education Network, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, University of Wisconsin, Northern Lights Gigapop, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan Gigabit Network, StarLight, USGS and Google. NDSU has purchased a router for the Northern Lights Gigapop to be located in Fargo and connected to the NW switch for peering with the PNWGP. No grant funds were used in the purchase, installation or maintenance of this router. Statistics for NW traffic available at the PNWGP web site. www.pnwgp.net/services/northern-wave/northern-wave-historical-traffic/
