GPN provides our members physical cyberinfrastructure and opportunities for inter institutional collaboration.
GPN has two POPs. One in Kansas City, Missouri and the other in Tulsa, Oklahoma. These two locations provide redundancy and expand our members’ reach. Both locations have Identical hardware. Our members take advantage of the hundred gig connections. The hardware has plenty of excess capacity because both GPN and our state networks believe in expanding the network before universities ask for it.
GRANT DEVELOPMENT & STRATEGY
GPN supports grants around the region. Every year, we provide letters of collaboration for members submitting their grants. Research data travels across our network infrastructure. GPN also provides a venue for coordination and submitting cross institutional grants. Two recent ones are linked below. Modern grants are a team sport, and GPN plays often!
GPN members from our members have successfully collaborated and been awarded these grants:
CC* Compute: GP-ENGINE: Great Plains Extended Network of GPUs for Interactive Experimenters
CC* Compute: GP-ARGO: The Great Plains Augmented Regional Gateway to the Open Science Grid
See the useage map here: https://ksu.gp-argo.greatplains.net/grafana/
INTERNET2 CONNECTIVITY
GPN provides a connection to Internet2 for our members. But that’s not all we offer.
ADVANCED CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE
The CI Program Committee (CIP) is made up of research computing directors around the region. This committee 1) assures a robust and informed CI community across the GPN region, 2) develops joint projects for the benefit of the GPN research community, 3) makes recommendations for shared research infrastructure improvements to the GPN Executive Council.
One recent shared resource is short-term storage in the Kansas City POP. It can be used as temporary storage for data migrations if one of our members has hardware failure or a researcher needs a staging area to transfer large amounts of data.
The GP-ENGINE and GP-ARGO grants were born out of CIP collaborations.
Professional Development Opportunities
GPN hosts and supports professional development activities. See our “events” tab on the main page for current ones.
Disaster Assistance
The Great Plains Network maintains high performance network connections to over 22 regular university members in six states, and is connected to various national and regional networks. This robust network infrastructure relationship and strong collaboration ties among member states and institutions provides an ideal foundation to assist each other in an Information Technology (IT) related disaster.
The purpose of this service is to develop a group of GPN affiliated entities that are willing and able to provide Information Technology assistance to other program participants in the event of a localized IT related disaster or emergency.
Requests may include provisions for the furnishing and exchanging of Data Center rack space, equipment, facilities, personnel, services and other related needs to help return IT services to an adequate level of service during a natural or human-made disaster and/or other emergency.
While it is understood that a participating institution may be experiencing a situation that prevents it from being able to offer the full measure of assistance to other participants at any given point in time, it is an expectation that participating institutions agree to strive toward providing a minimum level of support as documented in this agreement.
GPN’s role is to serve as a repository for the signed agreements, publicize the service and facilitate communication during an event.