In the Allentown/Bethlehem area, one of the largest employers in the region has been providing support for local school districts for many years by sending staff to classrooms to present the value of science and math in the real world.  They are reviewing connectivity as a means of expanding their outreach to a wider distribution of students and teachers during a single session, and without leaving their facility.  At the same time, they are contemplating high capacity access to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center for data analysis.  If they decide to connect, they will have avoided the cost of staffing a new data center, while increasing the productivity of their R&D efforts.

Overcoming the short term, high capacity bandwidth requirement

A new service offering from Internet2 called “Dynamic Circuit Networks” gives MAGPI the ability to provide from 1Gbps to 10 Gbps of bandwidth from an appropriately connected institution in PA, NJ, or DE to another similarly connected site in the United States and even specific locations in Europe.  Campuses of universities and research facilities can dynamically create these pathways for limited periods of time and then disconnect the circuit when the application is finished.  This resolves issues such as the research requirement for large amounts of bandwidth, but limits the financial responsibility to the length of the transmission.  Once the internal infrastructure is created, institutions can share this high capacity access for minimal cost and effort.  The University of Pennsylvania has requested this service for downloading very large files to their High Energy Physics Department from the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland.