Illinois State University received a nearly $100,000 grant last year from the National Science Foundation to create a comprehensive blueprint for improving its cyberinfrastructure (CI) to foster data-driven research and education.

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Grant participants were School of Information Technology Professor Dr. Yongning Tang and Illinois State Chief Information Officer Charles Edamala.

The goal of this project is to design a logical, reproducible, and defensible Science DMZ (demilitarized zone network) for Illinois State via a systematic approach called Analysis-Architecture-Design. The partnership and structure between campus information technology staff and the research community, especially faculty in computer networking discipline, presents a model for consolidating the ecosystem of CI and integrating new network technologies into an existing framework.

The design and prototype of an Intent-based Software Defined Science DMZ with high performance computing clusters are a novel extension of capabilities that are not commonly in place today. This planning project produces a profound impact on the science, technology, engineering, and math community at Illinois State to increase their awareness of the availability and scales of computation, data, and the related data analytic tools and expertise.