U Maryland-Led MAX To Provide Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Platform for Research, Education
Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX), a 100-gigabit, multi-state optical transport network operated by the
University of Maryland, is establishing an
advanced cyberinfrastructure platform for the research and education
community in the mid-Atlantic region.
The platform will be a terabit-capable point of presence (TeraPoP) located in
214,000-square-foot data center in the White Oak Science Gateway and Life
Sciences Village in Silver Spring, MD. The Federal Information Security
Management Act (FISMA)-compliant data center is operated by
ByteGrid, a provider of multi-tenant data
centers, and it is located within MAX's high-performance network footprint,
which has an aggregated capacity of 8.8 terabits per second. The data center
consists of two facilities with 91,000 square feet of computer room floor and
nine megawatts of uninterruptible power supply (UPS) capacity.
According to ByteGrid, MAX's new advanced cyberinfrastructure platform "will
provide a much-needed resource to members of the local life sciences research
community by helping them integrate massive storage archives (typically
involving petabytes of data) with high- performance compute and network
requirements." The platform will also offer direct connection to Amazon Web
Services and an Innovation Sandbox for the development of ultra-high-throughput
IT infrastructure solutions. The partnership will also enable both organizations
"to offer highly secure colocation solutions to participants within the
government community."
MAX currently offers a 100 Gbps advanced networking infrastructure, and it
achieved 400 Gbps speeds in recent field trials. It's aiming to offer 400 Gbps speeds (and
eventually 800 Gbps) in the future.
MAX participants include universities, federal research labs and other
research organizations in Washington and Baltimore. The network also serves as a
connector and traffic aggregator for the
Internet2 national backbone.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].