For the last three years, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has made a series of competitive grants to over 100 U.S. universities to aggressively upgrade their campus network capacity for greatly enhanced science data access, with many incorporating ESnet’s Science DMZ architecture. NSF is now building on that distributed investment by funding a $5 million, five-year award to UC San Diego and UC Berkeley to establish a Pacific Research Platform (PRP), a science-driven high-capacity data-centric “freeway system” on a large regional scale.

The PRP is basing its initial deployment on a proven and scalable network design model for optimizing science data transfers developed by ESnet. “ESnet developed the Science DMZ concept to help address common network performance problems  encountered at research institutions by creating a network architecture designed for high-performance applications, where the data science network is distinct from the commodity shared Internet,” said ESnet Director Greg Bell. “As part of its extensive national and international outreach, ESnet is committed to working closely with the Pacific Research Platform to leverage the Science DMZ and Science Engagement concepts to enable collaborating scientists to advance their research.”

In the PRP the Science DMZ model will be extended from a set of heterogeneous campus-level DMZs to an interoperable regional model. Read more.

Image courtesy Calit2.