Communications of the ACM
Computing and Networking Capacity Increases at Academic Research Institutions
Credit: sido.ru
Academic research institutions have experienced a significant increase in cyberinfrastructure resources since 2005, according to a new report from the U.S. National Science Foundation.
In fiscal year 2011, 59 percent of academic institutions reported bandwidth of at least 1 Gbit/second, up from 21 percent in fiscal year 2005, the report says. The percentage with network connections of 10 Gbits/s or greater rose to 25 percent from 2 percent. Doctorate-granting institutions accounted for 43 percent of institutions with bandwidth of at least 2.5 Gbits/s in 2011, versus 4 percent of non-doctorate-granting institutions. Forty-seven percent of institutions had dark fiber to an external network in 2011, up from 29 percent in 2005, and the percentage with dark fiber between their own buildings rose to 90 percent from 86 percent.
In addition, 192 of the 539 surveyed institutions owned centrally administered high-performance computing (HPC) resources of 1 teraflop or faster in 2011. Although 47 percent of doctorate-granting institutions provided HPC resources for their campuses, less than 9 percent of non-doctorate-granting institutions did so. Ninety-seven percent of HPC-providing institutions employ cluster architectures, and they also use architectures such as massively parallel processors, symmetric multiprocessors, or other types of architectures. The median total performance for centrally administered systems was 14 teraflops in 2011, up from 8 teraflops in 2009.
From National Science Foundation
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Abstracts Copyright © 2013 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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