The National Science Foundation has awarded the prestigious Campus Cyberinfrastructure — Network Infrastructure and Engineering (CC-NIE) grant to Dr. Deniz Gurkan in the Department of Engineering Technology. The grant will connect the University of Houston to the Internet2’s fastest network connection at 100 Gbps by 2014 — a giant leap from the current bandwidth connectivity of 10 Gbps.
This is the first initiative for UH to connect to the advanced software-defined network (SDN) built by the Internet2. Dr. Gurkan’s grant also has a unique flow separation and analysis system to enable high bandwidth data transfers from UH domain science laboratories with a network troubleshooting capability. For example, data generated from a research lab microscope may be transmitted at 10 Gbps, instead of the current 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps, towards high performance computing sites in the campus. “Our research will provide network engineers deeper insight to bandwidth utilization and consecutively, an improved process for computer network design and planning,” said Dr. Gurkan.
The grant will fund the connectivity upgrade to 100 Gbps for Rice University as well. Dr. Gurkan has previously led the efforts to bring a GENI rack to the University of Houston as part of her network science and research infrastructure efforts.