The National Science Foundation has awarded $500,000 to UW-Madison to upgrade its computing infrastructure so that researchers can more easily move large amounts of data to and from the campus.

The Campus Cyberinfrastructure – Network Infrastructure and Engineering grant from NSF, along with an Early Concept Grant for Exploratory Research from NSF, will allow UW-Madison to pool talents in Computer Sciences, the Department of Information Technology and other areas to support research activities.

“We could not have won this grant award without the participation of nine campus research partners, including the Center for High Throughput Computing,” said Bruce Maas, chief information officer for the UW-Madison.

“Over the two years of the grant, the university will upgrade its hardware, software and staff resources to deal with the explosion of ‘big data’ generated by campus researchers in the hard sciences, arts, humanities and social sciences,” Maas continued. “That includes neutrino particle detection by the Ice Cube project at the South Pole, the collection of satellite weather data by the Space Science and Engineering Center, and the particle physics research conducted by UW scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.”

Maas said the campus will provide 100 gigabit connectivity through a “Science DMZ,” which is a portion of the campus network set aside for high-performance scientific work. The grant will fund hardware acquisitions to provide high-speed network links to the DMZ and to national networks, including a link to Internet2. Read more at http://www.cio.wisc.edu/