The ability to transfer or share large amounts of data has become a significant limiting factor across science and engineering disciplines. The project, "CC*IIE Networking Infrastructure: Riverfront Campus Research Network," removes these network impediments at the new Tulane Riverfront Center of Excellence (RFCOE), enhancing researchers capabilities both within the borders of the campus and beyond. Enhanced experimental freedom and increased technological capabilities strengthen ongoing research and will inspire new collaborations and investigations enabling the expansion of the university population that utilizes computational resources. The projects that benefit from this increased functionality have tremendous impacts on the interests of the greater community, including an examination of sediment dynamics and quantitative stratigraphy in the Mississippi River Delta and the Woods Hole Global Rivers Observatory project to understand the ways climate change, deforestation, and other contemporary environmental concerns impact river chemistry and land-ocean linkages.
This project extends the Tulane dedicated high-speed science network and the new Tulane HPC resource to the RFCOE, enabling researchers' access to high performance computers, connecting them to local, regional, and national resources. It addresses the "last meter" problem, allowing researchers to provision a 10-gigabit connection from their workstations, laboratories and instruments with a 40Gbps uplink to Tulane's new HPC cluster, regional institutions through the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI), and national centers that peer with Internet2 (I2) including members of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) consortium.
