An astrophysics project connecting UC Santa Cruz’s Hyades supercomputer cluster to NERSC via ESnet and other networks won the CENIC 2018 Innovations in Networking Award for Research Applications announced last week.

Through a consortium of Science DMZs and links to NERSC via CENIC’s CalREN and the DOE’s ESnet, the connection enables UCSC to carry out the high-speed transfer of large data sets produced at NERSC, which supports the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and AGORA galaxy simulations, at speeds up to five times previous rates. These speeds have the potential to be increased by 20 times the previous rates in 2018. Peter Nugent, an astronomer and cosmologist from the Computational Research Division, was pivotal in the effort. Read UC Santa Cruz’s press release.