Harrisburg, PA (November 18) — The Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research (KINBER), a non-profit membership organization devoted to fostering collaboration through technology, and ESnet, the Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network, announced today the establishment of a new peering connection between KINBER’s PennREN network and the ESnet national network which leverages Internet2’s AL2S service.
The new 10 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) based peering connection will allow for greater capacity, speed and enhanced research capabilities for several PennREN connected higher education institutions across Pennsylvania, including Swarthmore College, Drexel University, Pennsylvania State University, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh, and Lehigh University.
Research applications that will benefit from this new enhanced connection include those in areas such as exascale computing; machine learning algorithms for matching theories, simulations and observations in cosmology; chemical imaging and other advanced Dept. of Energy (DOE) funded basic research in physical science. Total funding from DOE Office of Science for research in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was nearly $37.5M in the last reported year (FY2015) according to DOE [taken from data available at http://science.energy.gov/universities/sc-in-your-state/].
“As a result of this new peering connection between PennREN and ESnet, KINBER continues to provide added value to its members in the research and education sectors by providing significantly enhanced access to the resources and infrastructure available through ESnet,” said Wendy Huntoon, KINBER president and CEO.
KINBER and ESnet also partner on the WINS (Women in IT Networking at SC) initiative. Funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and directly from ESnet, the program funds early to mid-career women in the research and education (R&E) network community to participate in the setup, build out and live operation of SCinet, the Supercomputing Conference’s (SC) ultra high performance network. SCinet supports large-scale computing demonstrations at SC, the premier international conference on high performance computing, networking, data storage and data analysis and is attended by over 10,000 of the leading minds in these fields.
“ESnet is pleased to continue our partnership with KINBER through this new peering connection,” said ESnet Director Inder Monga. “This next step will offer added collaboration and research opportunities of value to both organizations.”