Phila. universities to create statewide electronic database

Federal stimulus money is finally funding a statewide research and education network that has been planned by Penn and other higher education institutions in Pennsylvania for seven years.

For the first time, the Pennsylvania Research and Education Network, or PennREN, will provide the University with the “ability to work on a statewide level with different institutions’ hospitals, libraries and museums over a super-fast broadband network,” according to Strategic Planning Consultant for Penn’s MAGPI Jennifer Oxenford.

MAGPI, or the Mid-Atlantic GigaPOP in Philadelphia for Internet2, provides access to advanced network infrastructure for institutions in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. It is part of Penn’s Information Systems and Computing central IT organization.

Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research, a coalition of Pennsylvanian colleges and universities, was awarded $99.6 million in federal stimulus money to construct PennREN.

The statewide network “has been a long time coming,” Oxenford said.

“I’ve been dreaming about this probably for the last seven years,” said Greg Palmer, director of MAGPI. He explained that, despite having interested several institutions around Pennsylvania, “the difficulty was always the one-time startup fee of construction and electronics” when it came to garnering support from the state.

Palmer said the first segments of the network, which will be built using fiber-optic technology, will be completed within six months. But he said he envisions that upon its completion in three years, 1,700 miles of fiber and electronics will allow Penn and other institutions in rural communities to “draw resources” from each other, including biopsy consulting for hospitals and foreign language lessons.

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