The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded NDSU a grant of $751,244 to support of the project titled "Northern Tier Network – North Dakota and South Dakota Access Improvement." The project is under the direction of Bonnie Neas vice president for information technology, and Claude Garelik, information technology security officer for the South Dakota State Board of Regents System.
The Northern Tier Network Consortium is a regional network initiative with the goal to provide a robust research network connection for educational institutions in the upper-northwestern states. With current endpoints in Chicago and Seattle, the network ensures Internet2 members in the Northern Tier can establish a multi-Lambda connection to a national or international aggregation point.
“This award is really a recognition by NSF of how important the Northern Tier Network is to this region,” said Neas, noting the funding will help connect advanced networking systems in North Dakota and South Dakota. “We’ve had our east-west connections in place for more than a year, and this begins the work of our north-south connection.”
She said the consortium is now working with vendors and expects the connection with the South Dakota system to be completed in about a year.
According to the grant, the new network link will be used for research and education traffic. After completion of the renovation, the network will be used to conduct research resulting in the submission of publications in each of three areas: real-time predictive modeling of drought, rainfall and hail; how the national research and education network performs when used by scientists to access data repositories at Earth Resource Observation Systems (EROS) and U.S. Forrest Service sites; and research that involves the use of remote access to NDSU's scanning electron microscope by scientists in South Dakota.
The award is effective Sept. 1 and expires Aug. 31, 2012. The award is funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. More information about the grant can be found at www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=arra0509.