CC* Regional: Advancing Maryland Research and Education Network for Under-Resourced Institutions Through a Science DMZ and 10Gbps Upgrade

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MDREN, the Maryland Research and Education Network, an organization under the University System of Maryland, provides advanced network services to 40+ education, research, and public service institutions throughout the State of Maryland and connections to regional and national resources.High-speed networking infrastructure is vital to researchers and STEM educators in our community. Smaller/under resourced/rural institutions like Frostburg State University (FSU), Salisbury University (SU), the four research labs that are part of University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences (UMCES), the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center (MPRC) as part of University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM), and HBCUs like University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES) and Morgan State University have serious limitations in accessing and transferring huge datasets amongst themselves and collaborators at NOAA, NASA, NIH, USGS, and others. This proposal significantly increases network bandwidth for 6 institutions including research centers and labs by 10x and adds a Science DMZ for data transfers from other sites to enable the full potential of these institutions. These upgrades allow researchers at each institution to reliably connect to supercomputers and big data repositories, increase computational capabilities, and increase inter-institution collaboration. MDREN will a special path from the science DMZ machine to each lab that will facilitate high speed transfer. This would be significantly faster than doing transfers through campus firewalls.This proposal helps rural or under-resourced institutions and HBCUs better collaborate with peer institutions in the greater Maryland region, collaborators around the world, and key science organizations such as NASA, NIH, and NOAA.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.