University of Chicago Named in National Science Foundation’s $20 Million CONECT Award under the Forthcoming ACCESS Program
Chicago–April 27, 2022 – The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $20 million over five years to the CONECT project, one of the projects under the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem Services and Support (ACCESS) program announced in 2021. The COre National Ecosystem for CyberinfrasTructure (CONECT) project will be responsible for the Operations and Integration Services elements of the ACCESS program, and will deliver innovative integrations across the NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure ecosystem in operations, data, networking and cybersecurity. CONECT will be led by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (NCSA), in partnership with the University of Chicago, Florida International University, Indiana University, PSC, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego.
The award continues support for Globus, a research data management service developed and operated by the University of Chicago, and for staff with expertise in building open and interoperable distributed research cyberinfrastructure (CI).
In the previous TeraGrid program, the current XSEDE program, and now the new CONECT project, the University of Chicago has contributed to the national CI by engaging the community to understand their science driven needs, integrating technologies that increase researcher productivity, building cyberinfrastructure discovery services, and establishing integration roadmaps for service providers.
“The University of Chicago team looks forward to expanding the development and adoption of an advanced, open research CI”, said JP Navarro, CONECT Co-PI from the University of Chicago and Argonne National Lab.“Through proven technologies such as Globus, we will continue to enable seamless integration of diverse service providers and accelerate science.”
Over the past 11 years the Globus service has provided scalable data management, file sharing and federated identity and access management to thousands of researchers. Discoveries by scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the IceCube Observatory were made possible as a result of having access to XSEDE resources such as Globus. Over 1.7 million transfers have been completed by XSEDE researchers, and Globus now transfers 1.5 PB per month in recent months to and from XSEDE systems. The Globus service will continue to provide infrastructure for data management in the CONECT project and the University of Chicago team will work with CONECT users to broaden access to advanced Globus services beyond file transfer and sharing.
“We are delighted to be a part of CONECT team and to be able to continue to enable researchers to have access to Globus research data management services to tackle grand research challenges in areas such as biomedical research, earth and space sciences, materials science, and climate science,” states Rachana Ananthakrishnan, Executive Director, Globus.
“As we look to democratize the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem, we are glad to partner with the University of Chicago team who bring expertise in delivering services like Globus to researchers to accelerate scientific discovery,” states Amy Schuele, CONECT’s principal investigator.
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About Globus
Globus is a platform for research data management, used by leading non-profit and commercial research organizations, national laboratories, and government facilities worldwide. Operated by the University of Chicago, the Globus service enables secure, reliable file transfer, sharing, and data management automation throughout the research lifecycle. The service is integrated into data portals, science gateways, and other web applications that manage data distribution from instruments and provide access to reference datasets. Globus is supported by subscribers and funding from the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Sloan Foundation.