The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded The University of Minnesota $500,000 to build a dedicated research and computing network enabling researchers on its Twin Cities campus.
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The new network, called the Gopher Science Network (GSN), will link the University's world-class physical and intellectual resources to state, regional, national and global research and education partners.
The network will support efforts to advance the University's strategic plan, which calls for the institution to harness its research breadth and depth to address society's most complex and consequential problems.
The GSN will have high-speed links to regional optical networks to address both capacity and capability requirements of two NSF-funded centers located on the U of M's Twin Cities campus - the Polar Geospatial Center and the Minnesota Population Center - several core campus research facilities, and advanced research in dynamic networks and high-performance computing.
Specifically, the GSN will have an immediate and lasting impact on seven campus research and service groups linked to the following research areas: genomics, proteomics, advanced networking, high resolution, satellite imagery, demographics, magnetic resonance and advanced computational research and infrastructures.
These impacts will immediately lower barriers to creating end-to-end workflows between core instrumentation facilities and centralized computing and data storage. Longer term, the GSN will serve as a platform for network research, advance cyberinfrastructure developments, and encourage novel research and education uses in all disciplines.
On a national scale, the GSN will not only benefit NSF-funded research, but it also will strengthen existing partnerships with other agencies, including NASA, National Institutes of Health, United States Department of Energy, United States Department of Defense and the United States Geological Survey.
In addition, the network will serve universities nationwide through access to facilities, data and intellectual resources.
The University of Minnesota supports over 150 graduate degree programs and is the second-largest institution of higher education in the Midwest. ■