The Maryland Research and Education Network (MDREN) recently received the Campus Cyberinfrastructure Regional Award (ID 2018823) from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for Advancing Maryland Research and Education Network for Under-Resourced Institutions Through a Science DMZ and 10Gbps Upgrade.

MDREN provides advanced network services to education, research, and public service institutions throughout the State of Maryland and connections to regional and national resources. This high-speed networking infrastructure is especially vital to researchers and STEM educators in their community.

In the award proposal, MDREN identified six smaller, under-resourced and/or rural institutions in their community with serious limitations in accessing and transferring huge datasets amongst themselves and collaborators at NOAA, NASA, NIH, USGS, and others. The NSF award helps MDREN enable the full potential of these institutions by increasing network bandwidth 10x and adding a Science DMZ for data transfers from other sites. These upgrades allow researchers at each institution to reliably connect to supercomputers and big data repositories, increase computational capabilities, and increase inter-institution collaboration.

MDREN will also construct a special path from the science DMZ machine that will facilitate high speed transfer to each of the labs identified in the proposal. This makes transfers significantly faster than doing them through campus firewalls.

Through the NSF award, MDREN continues to serve their community and enable greater collaboration between rural, under-resourced institutions and their peer institutions in the greater Maryland region and around the world. [Read the full announcment at USM Center | News]