The Florida State University is building a dedicated campus research network to significantly accelerate both local and national transmission rates of "big data" among collaborators participating in NSF funded research. The campus network improvements form the foundation of the newly created NoleNet Express-lane. Our work leverages the availability of unused or "dark fiber" to cost effectively connect campus network switches with core instrumentation and data storage facilities. The new network supports leading edge instrumentation used to better understand the structure and function of complex biological molecules, the organization of agriculturally important genomes, and the processes and patterns of evolution and population dynamics.
To share results and instrumentation with a broad audience, the project improves by a factor of 40 the connectivity to research partners beyond FSU's campus boarder by upgrading the switching infrastructure between FSU's campus "Express-lane" network and Florida's statewide optical network Point-of-Presence. These improvements, coupled with the newly created Sunshine State Education & Research Computing Alliance (SSERCA), are helping to enhance FSU's ability to support collaborative activities across the state of Florida. SSERCA works to bring together Florida's geographically distributed educational institutions and to create a Cyberinfrastructure that can be used by FSU faculty as bridge to national computing and data storage resources. Routing local and regional network traffic related to research onto an advanced dedicated network lowers the barriers to scientific discovery by removing bottlenecks related to sharing data and instrumentation and supporting leading edge data analysis workflows.
