ACADEMIA

Researchers at colleges and universities statewide can engage in greater data-intensive research with better speed, efficiency and reliability due to a $$1.17 million cyber connectivity upgrade completed yesterday.

Funded by a National Science Foundation grant, the Oklahoma Optical Initiative will benefit the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University, the state’s OneNet, the University of Tulsa, Langston University, the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation and a variety of other institutions across the state.  The initiative is designed to deliver improved network reliability, robustness, availability and potentially bandwidth to Oklahoma’s researchers.

"At its core, this initiative will facilitate greater collaboration among institutions statewide,” said Loretta Early, OU Vice President for Information Technology. “It will position the University of Oklahoma and our state to successfully compete for grant funding and will provide educational and career advancement opportunities for Oklahomans."

The network connectivity for supercomputers at OU and OSU has been upgraded to as much as 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps), a tenfold increase. For OU researchers, this change translates to greater collaboration and analysis in the areas of weather forecasting, high-energy physics, ecology, bioenergy and alternative fuels, and many others.

Horst Severini of OU's High Energy Physics group oversees the US ATLAS Tier2 Computing facility at OU. Among Oklahoma institutions, OU's most active collaborator in the Tier2 consortium is Langston University.   Currently, sharing large amounts of data can take upward of several hours, slowing down the consortium’s research.

"The increase in connectivity for Langston's High Energy Physics research, from 100 Mbps to 10 Gbps, willenable our consortium to become far more productive in the worldwide quest to find the Higgs boson, an elusive subatomic particle long theorized but not yet observed," said Severini. “Sharing research data and findings with Langston will be easier than ever, increasing our chances of securing additional funding.”

The Oklahoma Optical Initiative is part of a larger project undertaken by OU Information Technology, especially the OU Supercomputing Center for Education and Research, to improve the state’s ability to transmit, store and access research data. The first phase of this initiative, a massive research data archive called the Oklahoma PetaStore, also was funded by a NSF grant. Now that both projects are underway, 23 Oklahoma institutions are expected to experience improved network connectivity to the largest research data archive in the state.

“These development projects are a huge step forward for Oklahoma that will encourage increased federal research funding and foster statewide research collaboration and success,” said Henry Neeman, OU Director of Research IT and the Principal Investigator on both projects, said of the initiatives.