A slew of physical and digital cyberinfrastructure improvements are coming to Allegheny College thanks to a $1.3 million National Science Foundation grant awarded to an intercollegiate partnership.
Led by Penn State’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS), six institutions throughout the Commonwealth will use the funds to expand an existing secure, specialized research network called the Pennsylvania Science Demilitarized Zone.
Katrina Yeung, Allegheny College’s Chief Information Officer, said the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, broadens the College’s bandwidth capabilities and provides access to high-compute clusters at other institutions, protecting research data all the while.
Yeung serves as Senior Personnel on the project. Executive Director of the Allegheny Lab for Innovation & Creativity Byron Rich is one of five Co-Primary Investigators across the Commonwealth. In those roles, the pair will provide input on how the DMZ can be expanded to support both the specific needs of Allegheny College researchers and the broader needs of partner institutions.
One of Allegheny’s focus areas is expanding research across the institution and allowing students to be involved in that research,” Yeung said. “This puts us in a network of other institutions who have similar research goals to share ideas, and also expands the availability of resources for a number of academic programs.
Yeung credited the work of both Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science Janyl Jumadinova and Professor of Physics James Lombardi for driving Allegheny’s investment in the project.
Currently, the amount of data collected by Jumadinova’s autonomous underwater monitoring project is limited by the storage capacity of external drives. A StarLink router paid for by the grant would hypothetically allow for collected data to be immediately transferred to College data centers.
Likewise, Lombardi’s astronomical models require immense computing power. The dedicated network will enable him to run models on the high-compute clusters more efficiently.
“The research being done at these institutions is amazing,” said Wayne Figurelle, assistant director of Penn State’s ICDS and the project’s primary investigator. “We are all working with, educating and training undergraduate students. Through this project, we want to broaden the reach of scientific education and research — not only for faculty, but for undergraduates. We want to increase research and education connections and collaborations with Penn State and across Pennsylvania.”
Grant dollars will also establish a physical connection between Allegheny College’s main campus and the ALIC @ Bessemer branch campus.
“It’s possible that federal regulations or company practices prohibit cloud-based projects,” Rich said. “By tying the campuses together, we can do a lot more theoretical research here on Main Campus — especially at Reis Hall when it’s completed — and transmit that directly for manufacturing and fabrication down at Bessemer.”
The improvements come on the heels of the announcement of the Tool City Talent Fund, a scholarship program that covers up to 90% of ALIC @ Bessemer course tuition for individuals pursuing careers in advanced manufacturing in select counties within northwestern Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio.
