Science DMZ

0.0.0.0.1 A purpose-built science network connecting campuses across Southern California to foster collaboration and research opportunities.

0.1 CC* Regional: A Purpose-built SoCal Science DMZ for Catalyzing Scientific Research Collaborations

0.1.0.0.1 Grant from National Science Foundation’s Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) Program

Collaborators: Carl Kesselman (Principal Investigator), Byoung-Do Kim (Co-Principal Investigator), and Yul Pyun (Co-Principal Investigator)

The Center for Advanced Research Computing (CARC), IT Services and the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) collaborated on a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant proposal titled “A Purpose-built SoCal Science DMZ for Catalyzing Scientific Research Collaborations”. They proposed to design a Science DMZ network that would connect smaller, under-resourced college campuses to larger regional and national research networks. They won the award (Award #2126319) on July 29, 2021, and began to put the plan in motion in collaboration with the Los Nettos Regional Network.

A Science DMZ is a special-purpose network that connects an organization’s network (in this case, the Los Nettos Regional Network) to larger networks, while still remaining secure and efficient enough for large-scale data transfers. It supports the network infrastructure and software necessary to facilitate high speed transfers of large-scale research data for regional and national scientific collaborations.

The college campuses included in the Los Nettos Regional Network are Loyola Marymount University, Occidental College, and The Claremont Colleges consortium, which consists of Claremont Graduate University, Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College, Keck Graduate Institute, Pitzer College, Pomona College, and Scripps College. These institutions benefit from the significant network capacity increase the Science DMZ supports, as well as the streamlined access to a wide array of resources that they wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to utilize.

This network is specially customized for each institution’s unique needs and follows the well-known Science DMZ guidelines established by ESnet. The network interconnects with state, national, and international networks, such as CENIC’s California Research and Education Network (CalREN), Internet2, and Pacific Wave, so the smaller institutions can benefit from these well-established research networks.

More information on the grant can be found here