Vanderbilt researchers now have access to 15 times more bandwidth, thanks to a new 10-gigabit-per-second circuit that began routing new traffic in December. The previous circuit allowed 662 megabits of data to be transferred per second.
“The new 10-gigabit-per-second circuit connects to Southern Crossing in Atlanta,” says Matthew Hall, assistant vice chancellor for information technology services and associate chief information architect for enterprise architecture. “This is a telecommunication hub similar to a large regional airport. Our traffic routes there and, in turn, can attach to various national labs, Internet 2, and other research-related networks.”
For researchers like Charles Maguire, professor of physics, more bandwidth is a huge plus. Maguire is involved in an international research project seeking to replicate the matter created at the time of the Big Bang. Vanderbilt is the proposed primary U.S. data repository and analysis site for the project, which is being conducted using the Large Hadron Collider at the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland.
“The new bandwidth ensures that this data can be transferred rapidly to Vanderbilt, and is the primary reason Vanderbilt was chosen as the best place in the United States to analyze it,” Maguire says.