On October 27th, the Commerce, Justice, and Science Appropriations Subcommittee announced a $1.2-million National Science Foundation grant to Hopkins and the University of Maryland at College Park. The grant is supported by the NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure.
The schools will use the money to build a more advanced scientific network, which will end up being one of the fastest in the world. Hopkins' network capacity will increase to 100 gigabits per second, which means that it will be able to transfer larger amounts of data. It also means that it will become one of the first public Internet connections in the nation that can operate at that speed. This speed will allow Hopkins to continue to be a leader in most scientific fields. It will also allow Maryland to be at the center of new scientific discoveries.
Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski, the Chairwoman of the subcommittee, made the announcement. She expressed her pleasure at being able to award the grant, stating that Hopkins is one of the first universities to expand their data pipeline to this level. She also expressed satisfaction because the data pipeline will hopefully vitalize the state economy and provide new jobs.
A data pipeline is a method in computing that contains a set of elements that process data. These elements are connected together and so can be executed quickly. The establishment of one at Hopkins means that researchers will be able to analyze many large and complex sets of data. These data sets will come from such sites as Google, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Some of the fields that the pipeline will be used for are astrophysics, genomics, ocean circulation and medical research.
The lead researcher on the project is Alexander Szalay, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Hopkins. The pipeline will be built at the Bloomberg Center and supported by the regional MAX research and engineering network aggregation point at UMD.
