The project team, composed of campus administration, computer scientists and domain scientists, is working to bring 100 Gbps networking, an improved Science DMZ, and improved network research and development capabilities to the UNL campus. This serves projects at the Holland Computing Center (HCC), which provides centrally managed computational research resources and expert personnel for the support of hundreds of computational scientists across the state of Nebraska.
The proposal team is upgrading UNL's network capacity to 100 Gbps to Internet2 from the Great Plains Network in Kansas City to HCC's Lincoln data center. This provides greatly enhanced access to HCC's existing high performance computing as well as over a petabyte of high-energy physics data for U.S. CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid).
One driver for increased network bandwidth is the "Any Data, Anytime, Anywhere" project, led at UNL, which enables unorganized data analysis to individual U.S. CMS physicists through remote data access. Additional areas of work benefiting from the improvement include: Brain Imaging and Analysis, Next Generation Sequencing, Traffic Engineering, the Open Science Grid and MobilityFirst Future Internet architecture. The project aligns well with other local network research; for example, allowing greater WAN bandwidth to be dedicated to projects such as Lark, a prior CC-NIE award focusing on integrating the network and computing layers. This also funds hardware improvements to the local Science DMZ for monitoring (perfSonar-PS) and security (Bro IDS).
