Ecosystem for Research Networking

The Ecosystem for Research Networking (ERN, formerly the Eastern Regional Network) was formed to simplify multi-campus collaborations and partnerships in the Northeast, in order to advance the frontiers of research, pedagogy, and innovation. The ERN is first and foremost a network of people interested in pursuing this goal, and who use and manage the campus and regional research computing, data, storage and network resources that can make it happen.

Vision & Mission
The vision of the ERN is to simplify, support, catalyze, and foster multi-campus collaborations and partnerships between academic institutions of all types and sizes across the U.S. that advance the frontiers of research, pedagogy, and innovation. The mission of the ERN is to achieve this vision through a consortium of academic institutions, research facilities, core service providers, network providers, and industry partners, both public and private, organized around a shared interest in supporting and enabling collaborative data and computation enabled science/ This is accomplished by providing standards, blueprints, policies, and training associated with the design and implementation of an infrastructure to access data and research instruments, a distributed federated environment designed to simplify, support, catalyze, and foster collaborative science, scholarship, and education. To realize our mission and vision, the ERN will enable collaborations for democratization of access to research instruments, technical expertise, infrastructure, services, and resources to lower barriers to participation for scientists engaged  in collaborative research across institutional and disciplinary boundaries.

ERN Evolution
The ERN was formed in 2017 to address the challenges researchers face when participating in multi-campus team science projects, associated with shared access to research computing and data located within the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. The ERN began as a regional effort for two principal reasons: (1) a desire for face-to-face interactions and physical proximity to and access to shared instruments, and (2) a desire to serve the unique characteristics of our region—for example, the Northeast contains eight different state university systems in a geographic area whose size is comparable to that of the state of California, with nine different regional network providers, and close to two-thousand colleges and universities of all types and sizes, many of which are under-resourced or under-represented. As the ERN has grown, we came to realize that by addressing the challenges which we felt were  unique to the region, expanding our scope beyond the Northeast would not entail significant new logistical challenges and may, in fact, be more effectively pursued at the national level.

More recently, the ERN expanded its scope after interactions with several research communities led to the realization that the ERN needed to treat physical scientific instruments such as telescopes, research vessels, genome sequencers, and scanning electron microscopes similarly to research computing, storage, and networking in cyberinfrastructure planning. There is a need to access, move, store, and process the massive amounts of data generated by scientific instruments, and to access instruments remotely through federated services available to both researchers and their collaborators. Through interactions with the scientific and cyberinfrastructure communities, the ERN learned that these capabilities are often an afterthought when installing and commissioning new instruments, which can limit the value of major investments and lead to complications when sharing access the instruments and data there from. The ERN is now working on developing a federated solution to enable academic institutions to offer core services to the broader U.S. scientific community.

The ERN core activities: 

• Organizing and/or supporting working groups focused on areas of interest to the community.
• Facilitating Workshops for deep dive explorations of cross-working group areas of interest.
• Hosting yearly All Hands Meetings to bring the community together to give updates and discuss future initiatives.
• Offering recommendations on data standards, architectural blueprints, and policies.
• Enabling delivery of training on topics related to new and emerging technologies and applications relevant to current areas of interest to ERN stakeholders.

Results of workshops, including findings and recommendations are shared with the broader community through publications and regional and national conference presentations. For example, three ERN papers were presented at the PEARC22 Annual Conference and the “ERN Cryo-EM Federated Instrument Pilot Project” paper received Best Short Paper. In addition to workshops, the ERN, along with its partners, offers a Data Science Seminar Series hands-on training of various software applications focusing on the support of Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence workflow methodology.  The workshops are open to anyone in the research community with emphasis on the  MSIs, HSIs, HBUCs, and EPSCoR institutions. Compute resources necessary for the on-hand efforts are made available to all participants and moderating support personnel address questions or issues. 

The ERN welcomes new members. For those interested in future participation in the Ecosystem for Research Networking (ERN), understanding who the stakeholders are, and membership requirements, please visit the ERN website www.ernrp.org.