Dr. Bing Wang, an associate professor of Computer Science & Engineering, was awarded a grant for close to $500,000 for her project proposed to the National Science Foundation, “Campus Cyberinfrastructure – Network Infrastructure and Engineering Program (CC-NIE), Network Infrastructure: Enabling Data-Intensive Research at the University of Connecticut through Science Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)”. A demilitarized zone, or DMZ, is a small sub-network inserted between a company’s private network and the outside public network to protect data-intensive research. The project was a joint effort by more than a dozen collaborators from the University of Connecticut, the UConn Health Center (UCHC,) and a team from University Information Technology Services.

According to the NSF website, “the CC-NIE program invests in improvements and re-engineering at the campus level to support a range of data transfers supporting computational science and computer networks and systems research. The program also supports network integration activities tied to achieving higher levels of performance, reliability and predictability for science applications and distributed research projects.”

“The main goal of the project is to provide at least ten times improvement in network speed to UCONN, the UCHC, and the connection between these two campuses to enable data-intensive scientific research,” says Dr. Wang, who served as the project’s leader. “This project will significantly facilitate research and increase the data transfer rate in a wide range of disciplines including physics, geography, statistics, biology, bioinformatics, quantitative cell biology and simulation, and computational genomics. It will alsoenhance the collaboration between Storrs and UCHC, allowing the computation and storage at the two campuses to be easily shared.”