The University’s partnership with the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative is quickly putting LSU at the forefront of scientific research, according to chemistry professor Randall Hall.
LONI, a Louisiana Board of Regents program, began in 2004 and currently provides Internet to all research institutions in Louisiana and Mississippi. LONI gives Web access to a total of 79 institutions, including multiple campuses of the Louisiana Technical Community College.
Those institutions share more than 85 teraflops of data for research. A teraflop refers to one trillion floating calculations per second. A computer processing at data speeds measured in teraflops can solve complicated math problems found in 4000-level classes in a nanosecond.
LONI Executive Director Donald Vandal said the University has “established itself as a nationally recognized research institution with strong credentials in cyberinfrastructure and computational research expertise, particularly due to its relationship with LONI.”
Vandal said the partnership has been productive and has resulted in a $20 million LA-SiGMA grant from the National Science Foundation.
The grant puts LSU as the lead institution among several other schools including Tulane, Louisiana Tech University, the University of New Orleans and Southern University. The project is cross-disciplinary and places a heavy focus on material and computational science, Hall said.
“The LA-SiGMA grant is a way for all of these institutions to collaborate in ways not previously possible,” Hall said. “One of those is a project I am working on that will enable the University to transmit courses, primarily on the graduate level, to other institutions.”
LONI strives to provide research to major institutions through supercomputers. LONI also provides commodity Internet access for the University.
The Daily Reveille reported in February that University Internet usage spiked to 17,000 devices on the lsusecure network at once – approximately 62 percent of the student population.
IT Communication and Planning officer Sheri Thompson said the increase in usage can be tied to an increased reliance on smartphones.
“Our firewall couldn’t handle all the traffic we were receiving, and it crashed,” Thompson said. “But we haven’t had any problems with our current one up to this point.”
Although not directly monitored by the University, LONI is housed in Frey Computing Center, where a recent renovation improved cooling and power capacity.
Vandal said LONI plans to take advantage of the improvements indirectly through attachments to the network.
“Because of the enhanced capacity in Frey, we won’t run into bottlenecks that slow things down,” Vandal said. “It will certainly help as we make attachments to the network with projects like LA-SiGMA.”
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Contact Joshua Bergeron at [email protected]