CC-NIE Network Infrastructure: Bandwidth for Leadership in Advancing Science and Technology (BLAST)

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The Bandwidth for Leadership in Advancing Science and Technology (BLAST) project award to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) is designed to significantly improving a wide range of science data flows for local, state of Tennessee, and national science and engineering research communities by connecting the UTK campus to the 100 gigabit per second national network and extending this connection to the leadership class high-performance computing (HPC) facilities at the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS). By dramatically improving the bandwidth available for all types of campus bridging, data transfer services to/from HPC resources, data archives, and wide-area network file systems, BLAST directly addresses bottlenecks to scientific discovery in leading data and compute intensive research activities.The network infrastructure upgrade provided by BLAST improves science and engineering research productivity and facilitates scientific discovery by enabling researchers to exploit high performance networking bandwidth for science data flows to support knowledge exchange and scientific discovery. Some examples uses of this upgraded network infrastructure include improved gridFTP data transfers, high-performance access to archives and WAN file systems, and data transfers with Globus Online. The BLAST project also includes end-to-end network performance tuning collaborations between UTK, NICS and four leading data and compute intensive research projects in earthquake simulation, numerical weather prediction, Earth climate research on intra-seasonal and inter-decadal time scales, and simulations for the study of climate effects on public health, water resources and energy. The information obtained and lessons learned will be disseminated to the broader community to share this important knowledge.