UNIVERSITY OF MAINE SYSTEM

The National Science Foundation has invested significant resources in EPSCoR jurisdictions in support of research infrastructure and capacity, including support for facilities, instrumentation and personnel. In the northeast, Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont have each made transformational progress towards building sustainable research capacity. However, continued success is limited in these small states by the modest sizes of scientific communities - populations are relatively small and faculty numbers are smaller still. These low numbers impede development of a critical mass of investigators and expertise at most institutions. A strategy for overcoming this handicap is to develop strong networks within the region that enable facility sharing and regional collaborations, allowing partner states to gain the full complement of resources of a large research enterprise and more easily participate in interdisciplinary collaboration, knowledge creation and transformational research. In 2006, the EPSCoR states of Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island and Delaware began a collaboration named the North East Cyberinfrastructure Consortium (NECC) to address the region?s profound and fundamental CI need for a fiber network. This collaborative proposal represents a comprehensive strategy to address the ?black hole of connectivity? in the NE through a plan for a regional fiber network and an organization that promotes cyber-enabled research projects and collaborations. The overall NECC project consists of: 1) a high-capacity network that will link these states with each other and the Internet2 backbone in a redundant and geographically diverse manner; 2) distributed datacenters for regional collaborations in Delaware and Maine; and 3) hires of cyber-knowledgeable faculty and staff to allow current cyber-enabled research to grow and make additional projects possible. This leverages existing infrastructure in strategic target areas to improve research capabilities, enhance interconnectivity and connect consortium members to national research and education networks. This fundamental research infrastructure is required to enable new collaborative research projects and provide access to remote core facilities in such areas as high performance computing (HPC) and the analysis and visualization of large data sets. Maine?s primary CI role in this collaborative project will be to provide two fiber runs for high capacity redundant loops for the Northern New England region. Fiber will be run from the University of Maine in Orono, Maine to Presque Isle, Maine for connection across the Canadian border to CANARIE, the Canadian backbone network. Additionally, a fiber run from Brunswick, Maine to Elllsworth, Maine will complete a redundant loop within the state (both Ellsworth and Brunswick have connections to Orono). This increased capacity will allow Maine researchers throughout the state to finally have access to critical resources such as UMaine?s supercomputer and specialized equipment at other research institutions. It will also allow Maine researchers to form new regional collaborations through increased access to data resources and enhanced videoconferencing capabilities, and to have access to national resources such as TeraGrid, large data sets, and visualization tools, which are all vital to the ability to increase competitiveness. Maine will also participate in special education and diversity activities with the other NECC states.

Clarification of Codes