Connecting the Islands: Cyber Connectivity for Science and Technology in Hawaii

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AbstractProposal Number: EPS-1007033Proposal Title: Connecting the Islands; Cyber Connectivity for Science and Technology in HawaiiInstitution: University of Hawaii Project Director: James R. GainesThis proposal will be awarded using funds made available by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).This RII Inter-Campus and Intra-Campus Cyber Connectivity (RII C2) award focuses on inter-campus and inter-island connectivity and seeks to provide new 10 Gbps connections among four specific locations. These connections are most critical to Hawaii?s thriving EPSCoR program as well as to the overall Science and Technology (S&T) research and STEM education agendas in Hawaii. The project will provide a ten-fold increase in capability among these key locations, and the design will be extensible in the future to all public higher education institutions in Hawaii and other key S&T locations. The connectivity among campuses proposed in this RII C2 will enable essential access to high performance computing facilities at the Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC), the new mass storage at University of Hawaii-Manoa (UHM), the new visualization and modeling capacity at University of Hawaii-Hilo (UHH), and STEM initiatives at Kapiolani Community College (KCC). It will also enhance more effective collaboration through emerging high definition videoconferencing among researchers across campuses and across disciplines throughout the state and beyond.Intellectual MeritThe four initial locations for this project were selected specifically to highlight the intellectual merit of new cyberinfrastructure-empowered methodologies within Hawaii and beyond. The Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC) is one of the six major U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) supercomputer facilities. Under the terms of an Educational Partnership Agreement, UH and the DoD have agreed to establish a complementary Hawaii Open Supercomputing Center at the MHPCC facility that will leverage the data center and operational support to provide High Performance Computing (HPC) resources for academic, governmental and commercial science and technology within Hawaii. The RII C2 project will support a broad range of world-class programs focused particularly in areas where Hawaii is viewed as having a competitive advantage: astronomy, oceanography, marine studies, geology & geophysics, climate studies, and evolutionary biology. The island of Hawaii has significant environmental diversity, thus UHH has made it a strategic priority to leverage its island-wide living laboratory in its research and education programs.Broader ImpactsThis program will directly and substantially impact efforts at KCC and UHH to engage Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islander and Filipino students in STEM research and education initiatives that have a strong focus on linkages between STEM disciplines and indigenous cultures and practices. This could bring more underrepresented populations into STEM disciplines and careers. The network enhancements will facilitate connectivity across Hawaii and to the rest of the world by providing more access to national and global networks, data collection and management tools, high performance computing, modeling, visualization, and virtual organizations. In addition, the improved cyber connectivity will help open Hawaii-based science to increased involvement from mainland based students and scholars which could facilitate greater intellectual innovation.