Equipment: CC* Network-Campus: The Need for Speed - Resourcing STEM Education and Research with Network Improvements

Goshen College’s campus networking project supports faculty and student-led research, research collaborations across institutions, and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. A growing number of STEM courses require cloud computing resources or hosted applications, creating a critical need for faster connectivity. The prior campus network also lacked redundancy and sufficient tools to prioritize academic data traffic.

With the network upgrade, faculty and students can adopt data-driven STEM applications and collect and transfer large data sets. Other benefits include network redundancy to eliminate single points of failure, the ability to prioritize STEM network traffic, and a faster connection to Indiana’s external research network. The improved STEM research opportunities provided to students will increase their participation in STEM and their preparation for the future STEM workforce.

The network upgrades directly enable Goshen’s STEM research and teaching programs, including computer science, biology, chemistry, molecular biology and biochemistry, physics, engineering physics, information technology, mathematics, and environmental and marine science. The project objectives are to (1) establish a geo-redundant network implementation to eliminate single points of failure; (2) implement a data transfer node to isolate STEM data transfers, increase the data transfer speed from 2 to 8 gigabits per second (Gbps), and add 144 terabytes storage; and (3) increase connection speed to the Indiana I-Light research network from 2 to 10 Gbps.

College staff, administration, and STEM faculty collaboratively designed the cyberinfrastructure upgrade plan, ensuring that the networking upgrades are feasible, sustainable, and address the needs of college STEM faculty and students.

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.