Kent State University (Kent State) and OARnet successfully partnered on a $383,734 grant submission to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (NSF Award #1925678) to design a ScienceDMZ. The teams at Kent State and OARnet worked to construct this virtual DMZ perimeter over a highly responsive regional WAN, which allows researchers at Kent State’s regional campuses in Ohio to uniformly access this cyberinfrastructure. The ScienceDMZ provides connections to OARnet’s optical exchange, enabling 100 Gbps of uninterrupted transfer rate capacity and allowing data-centric researchers across the disciplines to dramatically speed up access to and from their data-silos and supercomputing centers.
“The project enables Kent State researchers to enter a new era of big-data science. It will be available to all faculty and researchers across its eight-campus system to transfer very large data sets across other big-data sites,” said Javed Khan, professor and chair of computer science at Kent State. “This national scale advanced next-generation network could be implemented on schedule—thanks to the readiness of OARnet as one of world’s most sophisticated Research and Education Networks.”
The Science DMZ also leverages a broad set of compelling big-data projects. The project launches outdoor ultra-high-speed wireless access infrastructure in campuses connected to the Science DMZ to facilitate big-data-driven dense sensor and IoT research projects. The project brings the world of data-driven STEM research closer to this mass of students, a large percentage of whom are Pell Grant-eligible and/or first-generation college students.
More information can be found on OARnet’s Research Collaborations webpage.
