Arizona’s Sun Corridor Network announces two 100 gigabit connections to Internet2.
To better foster research collaboration between universities, Arizona says internet speed needs to get fast & furious.
The Sun Corridor Network, Arizona’s high-speed research and education (R&E) network, is now providing 100 gigabit per second (100G) connections to Internet2, for academic researchers at Arizona State University (ASU), Northern Arizona University (NAU) and the University of Arizona (UA).
The two Internet2 connections—one located in Phoenix and one in Tucson—aim to benefit Arizona’s public universities by facilitating high-performance, data-intensive research and collaboration among peers at national institutions to enable discovery, knowledge and information sharing.
The Sun Corridor Network is a collaborative effort sponsored by the Arizona Board of Regents’ (ABOR) three state universities—ASU, NAU and UA. Arizona public schools, colleges and libraries, as well as state universities and museums, are eligible to subscribe to the Sun Corridor Network.
(Next page: What Arizona researchers will now be able to do, thanks to better speed)
By utilizing the Sun Corridor Network, Arizona researchers are able to:
- Collect very large datasets from public streaming sources (environmental sensors, Twitter feeds, and Google searches) to build prediction models for health care and other industries for the INSITE Center for Business Intelligence and Analytics.
- Collaborate with research partners via the International Consortium for Technology in Biomedicine.
- Participate in larger collaborative models for conformant cloud solutions with the National Institutes of Health.
- Conduct pilots with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Cancer Cloud Genomics.
- Engage in programs such as NCI’s Genomics Data Commons and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases / National Human Genome Research Institute Human Microbiome Cloud.
Sun Corridor also enables tri-university research collaborations funded by the Arizona Board of Regents Innovation Fund (RIF), including:
- Arizona Environmental Grid Infrastructure Service, which supports the transition to informatics-intensive environmental research across all three universities.
- LiveData, an initiative to streamline administrative compliance and provide a common platform for researchers from Arizona’s public universities to share and store data.
“The Sun Corridor Network represents a tremendous opportunity for the advancement of the State of Arizona’s research and education objectives by using cutting-edge broadband technology to advance scientific breakthroughs,” said Gordon Wishon, chief information officer at ASU and current chair of the Sun Corridor Network Governing Board. “The high-speed network is also an instrument that Arizona’s K-12 schools and community colleges can use to collaborate with other schools, libraries and museums to expose students to real-world information and discoveries beyond the classroom.”
The Internet2 Network is built by and for the R&E community, and is designed to offer uninhibited performance to support and propel advanced research forward. With its new Internet2 connections, the Sun Corridor Network upgrades from two 5-gigabit connections in Phoenix and Tucson to two 100G connections.
This upgrade aims to enable scalable, resilient and flexible access to a global exchange of advanced computing, storage and science instruments with low latency and the performance and reliability that come with a dedicated R&E network.
“ASU, NAU and UA are engaged in some of the most demanding research projects in the world—from big data genomics to environmental informatics,” said Rob Vietzke, vice president of network services at Internet2. “The Sun Corridor Network’s upgrade to 2x100G will provide a 21st century foundation for this important work, with the added benefit of better connectivity for local community anchor institutions and students in Arizona.”
Material from a press release was used in this report.
- 25 education trends for 2018 - January 1, 2018
- IT #1: 6 essential technologies on the higher ed horizon - December 27, 2017
- #3: 3 big ways today’s college students are different from just a decade ago - December 27, 2017