The First National Research Platform Workshop: Toward A National Big Data Superhighway will be held at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana, on August 7 & 8, 2017. The workshop is sponsored by the Pacific Research Platform/National Science Foundation. Larry Smarr of UC San Diego and Jim Bottum of Internet2 are co-chairing the event. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together representatives from interested institutions to discuss implementation strategies for deployment of interoperable Science DMZs at a national scale.

The National Science Foundation funded a 5-year cooperative agreement for the Pacific Research Platform (PRP) to improve the end-to-end high-speed networking data transfer capabilities in collaborative, big-data science among 20 institutions including four National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and NASA supercomputer centers. As part of the PRP cooperative agreement, NSF requires that the ensemble of PRP technologies be extensible across other scientific domains and to other regional and national networks. In response to this requirement, the First National Research Platform (NRP) Workshop this summer will solicit input from many multi-state networking organizations (Internet2, The Quilt, ESnet) on how the PRP model might be extended to a national scale. The PRP leadership will communicate its successes and lessons learned to date. The Workshop will then focus on whether, how, and when the Science DMZ practice can be extended 10-fold to ~200 US universities and labs, thousands of researchers, and to their colleagues abroad.

For more information about the workshop, including registration details, please visit the workshop website: http://www.cvent.com/d/y5qz2z