Summary: This NSF-CC* award and resulting project made a number of significant improvements to connectivity infrastructure at the University of Nevada, Reno - Nevada's flagship public land-grant institution of higher education. These improvements (1) boosted aggregate campus connectivity to NevadaNet (the regional network provider) from 20 GbE to 100 GbE capacity; (2) created a separate high-performance physical network across campus of 40 GbE fiber circuits dedicated to research/teaching computing and data; (3) created dedicated "big data" and "streaming data" transfer servers and software systems for campus faculty use; and (4) established or upgraded key rural research and service networking connections in Lake Tahoe and eastern Nevada for real-time earthquake, wildfire, and climate monitoring. University projects that were active stakeholders in the award included: Earthquake Early Warning, AlertWildfire, Intelligent Mobility, and the Nevada Climate-ecohydrology Assessment Network. In the latter phase of the project, over a dozen separate laboratories across campus added their servers to the new network as early adopters. In addition, this was Nevada's first NSF Campus Cyberinfrastructure award, which served to introduce the state into the national community of practice around modern computing and data for higher education and research.

Intellectual Merit: Effective data networks are the foundations of technology-dependent operations and workflows within publicly-funded research and education. Nevada is one of the last states to join the national cyberinfrastructure community, especially in terms of campus networking and advanced data workflows capability and practice. While individual laboratories within the University have demonstrated early adoption of new technologies (for example, the Nevada Seismological Laboratory's region-leading and innovative earthquake, wildfire camera, and climate station regional network), the University itself has struggled with awareness and adoption of national cyberinfrastructure best practices. This award was coincident with the University's designation as a Carnegie "Highest Research Activity", or "R1" institution, which was excellent timing to introduce University technology personnel to national best practices for cyberinfrastructure development. This project catalyzed several key developments across the University: (1) it created the need for a specific Campus Cyberinfrastructure Plan; (2) it generated broader awareness across researchers and administration as to the importance of cyberinfrastructure for development; (3) it directly engaged multiple elements of existing IT with exclusively research-facing work; (4) it brought together research stakeholders from different departments and disciplines; (5) it created new research-facing roles of technology professionals on campus, piloted by graduate students. All of this combined to begin what is typically a slow (but necessary) campus culture change around the role of technology in 21st century research and education. More directly, the project had immediate impact on dozens of research teams and labs around campus, providing them with data transfer tools and higher speed ports for their co-located servers (10 GbE vs. 1 GbE).

Broader Impacts: While the project was focused on a few discrete science use cases to illustrate the needs and improvements, the overall impact of increasing total campus upstream connectivity to the internet and the national Internet2 network provided comfortable capacity overhead for further development of campus internal networks and security systems. This effect became immediately apparent when COVID-19 impacts of remote work required campus IT to rapidly deploy much larger remote-access on-premise infrastructure for teaching and research workstations. There were no problems of congestion or collision as the campus switched to over 12 months of fully remote operations. In terms of personnel/professional development, this project created a number of cross-disciplinary opportunities for staff, faculty, and students. The research-first orientation of the project "broke the barrier" for graduate students to take roles alongside enterprise IT engineers in developing and maintaining data and network facing soft and hard infrastructure. This brought all parties into contact with the concept of the "research technology professional", a nationally-emerging career track. This project led to several follow-on proposals for research and research infrastructure from faculty members at the University, and this is expected to continue - impacting various disciplines and departments across campus as they leverage the connectivity, infrastructure tools, expanding institutional knowledge, and alignment with national cyberinfrastructure communities and development.

Last Modified: 10/27/2021
Modified by: Scotty D Strachan