This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The Northern Tier Networking Consortium (NTNC) was formed in 2003 to extend and expand broadband and high-performance optical networks, connecting the Northern Tier to the National Research and Education Network (NREN). The goal of this Research Infrastructure Improvement Inter-Campus and Intra-Campus Cyber Connectivity project is to extend the reach and capability of the Montana University System's (MUS) newly activated owned-fiber network, the Montana Northern Tier Network (MT-NTN). Three new connection points will be built to facilitate local site connections to computational and data storage facilities in the State of Montana Miles City Data Center (MCDC), located in Miles City, Montana; and to use new and existing connection sites to create and support site connections for Montana State University-Billings (MSUB), Salish Kootenai College (SKC, a Tribal College), Miles City Community College (MCCC) and Dawson Community College (DCC).
Intellectual Merit This extension of the MT-NTN will allow students and faculty at MSUB, SKC, MCCC, and DCC to engage in expanded undergraduate research programs through enhanced collaboration with other colleges and universities in the system. The project will also provide access for researchers in Montana to an enterprise level data storage and computational facility. Access to this facility will provide back-up, storage and disaster recovery capabilities for vast amounts of research data through a secure, high bandwidth, high capacity network. The two core research focus areas are: environmental and ecosystem science, and health and biomedical sciences. Improved connectivity would enhance the collection and streaming of data from environmental sensors to local data aggregation points and would enable real-time observation of ecosystem changes on a national network scale. The extension of the network into rural and underserved areas would support research and understanding of the health conditions that affect Montana's rural, indigenous, and lower socioeconomic populations. The investigators and other researchers would collaborate with colleagues participating in the Health Information Exchange of Montana (HIEM), a rural health network consisting of five independently owned and operated hospitals and two federal funded Community Health Centers. This collaboration is valuable as the distances in the state are very large, presenting an additional difficulty for such time-sensitive collaboration.
Broader Impacts The project leverages ongoing diversity activities funded through current Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) at Montana State University (MSU) and The University of Montana (UM). This project will increase opportunities for collaboration in research and education activities by providing on-line access to all participating institutions. Workforce development activities will be augmented in order to advance and retain Native American students from the Tribal Colleges in the STEM disciplines throughout their undergraduate and graduate careers. A research experience for undergraduates program that includes the 2-year and Tribal Colleges will be developed. Students at DCC and MCC would have the opportunity to collaborate directly with faculty and students at UM and MSU. Faculty at these institutions would have increased access to new graduate-level courses within the framework of MSU's National Teachers Enhancement Network (NTEN). The new courses, covering energy, ecology, and related topics, will become part of a permanent catalog of course offerings and establish a model for EPSCoR to nationally reach teachers of science with timely and accurate science content.
Over the past two years and continuing through August 30, 2013, The University of Montana and Montana State University Information Technology organizations have worked to implement an EPSCoR cyberinfrastructure grant. Through this grant, the Montana University System network infrastructure has been made more robust and has expanded to tribal and community colleges within the state. Over the two years of the award, the system specifications and installation were implemented and launched. The major goals of this project were to engineer and deploy high-speed internet connections between the Montana Northern Tier Research and Education Network and three community colleges, Miles City, Dawson and Flathead Lake Community Colleges, one four year tribal college, Salish Kootenai College, Montana State University Billings and the Miles City State Data Center. The need for this award was based on the relative geographic isolation of several Montana-system community and tribal colleges that, until now, have been connected to the University of Montana and other sites with somewhat limited bandwidth speeds. The grant was implemented using current best practices and national standards in networking and the resulting technical improvements are providing the requisite infrastructure for enhanced research and education in rural Montana. As summarized in Table 1, bandwidth at the community and tribal colleges was tripled, enabling video conferencing, streaming video, internet-based research, large dataset transfer, and the potential for cloud services. Connectivity to the state data center in Miles City has ramifications for the entire Montana University System as it provides secure, state-of-the-art facilities for computing and storage. Secondary benefits of this grant were the formation of peering connections between Montana and neighboring research and education organizations in North and South Dakota, Utah, and Idaho and the enhancement of the network touch point at the University of Montana to provide more efficient connectivity across organizations. The extent of the network infrastructure enhancements are show graphically in Diagram 1. The work completed through this grant paved the way for a successful NSF CC-NIE proposal, awarded August, 2013. With the new grant funds, UM will now be able to continue to make progress on The University’s cyberinfrastructure plan. Provision of high bandwidth to three campus buildings will enable more productive data intensive research in the areas of Biology, Geography, and the Geosciences.
