Aug. 1 — The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Office of Information Technology (OIT) has been awarded a 2-year, $500,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to boost its high-technology research internet network. UTSA will use the funding for the project, “The Roadrunner High-Performance Science, Engineering and Business Demilitarized Zone (DMZ),” to install 10-gigabit-per-second network switches in several research buildings on the UTSA Main Campus.
The new switches will increase network bandwidth from one gigabit-per-second to 10 gigabits-per-second and improve the speed of data transfer rates five to 10 times for as many as 1,000 network ports in select research laboratories.
“The project will benefit UTSA researchers who frequently transfer large amounts of data, including those studying real-time remote surgery, smart buildings and grids, cybersecurity, cloud computing and other topics that require large datasets,” said Brett League, director of the Research Computing Support Group. “The improved infrastructure will also allow UTSA researchers to fully utilize internal resources such as the institutional High Performance Computing cluster and Advanced Visualization Lab.”
Four UTSA faculty and staff members are serving as principal investigators for the project:
- Bryan Wilson, Interim Vice Provost for Information Technology, Principal Investigator
- Harry Millwater, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Co-principal Investigator
- Bernard Arulanandam, Interim Vice President for Research, Economic Development and Knowledge Enterprise, Co-principal Investigator
- Brent League, Director of the Research Computing Support Group, Co-principal Investigator
Millwater and League collaborated with multiple OIT staff members including Daniel Byrd, director of Infrastructure Services and Keith Trevino, OIT manager for Communications Infrastructure Services, to help develop a strategic technology plan to foster innovative research and collaboration across a broad range of academic disciplines.
“The project is exciting for two major developments. First, a new research-dedicated network will be deployed across campus that will exclusively handle research network traffic, and second, the project will address the “last mile” bottleneck of networking – the research lab to the campus backbone,” said Millwater. “With these two improvements, research connectivity will be dramatically improved.”
UTSA is ranked among the nation’s top five young universities, according to Times Higher Education.
Source: Danicia Steele, University of Texas at San Antonio