CC-NIE Network Infrastructure: 100Gig Connection to Florida LambdaRail (FLR)

The project is one crucial building block in a comprehensive strategy to create a highly functional cyberinfrastructure for researchers at the University of Florida (UF) and their collaborators in the state, the nation, and the world. Supporting collaborations means moving large amounts of data or providing interactive access to data and processing capability from remote locations. The University of Florida and its partner institutions in SSERCA (Sunshine State Education and Research Computing Alliance) are creating a collaborative framework on top of the Florida Lambda Rail (FLR) for geographically dispersed research teams to easily transfer data between institutions, analyze the same data shared via file systems mounted at their respective high-performance computing resources, and share data with colleagues across the world, with appropriate authentication and authorization as needed.

The award funds the acquisition of a switch capable of transmitting at the rate of 100 Gbps to connect the UF campus research network to the FLR regional network and to the newly built 100 GigE Internet2 network. Some of the ongoing collaborative projects that will benefit directly from this high bandwidth capacity are the following: 1) The Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, searching for the Higgs boson. 2) The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project enhances the capability to accurately model both long-term climate evolution and crop growth to allow decision makers to prepare for ever changing weather patterns. 3) The Integrated Digitized Biocollections is a project to create the infrastructure for a national resource providing a searchable collection of data.