Lafayette awarded grant for community cloud project (Daily Advertiser)

Jan. 27, 2020

The University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the Lafayette Consolidated Government received a grant for a community cloud program, US Ignite announced last week.

US Ignite, a nonprofit supporting the smart community movement, announced awards for Lafayette and three other communities through its National Science Foundation-funded Smart Gigabit Communities project.

The other three communities are Austin, Texas; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Eugene, Oregon. US Ignite chose these communities based on the social impact of the project, use of advanced technology, and the pre-commercial status of the proposed service.

The program now includes more than 30 communities.

“Over the last several years, the National Science Foundation has invested in fundamental research that is enabling smart and connected communities throughout the U.S., including identifying pathways for scaling and sustaining the results that are emerging,” said Erwin Gianchandani, NSF’s acting assistant director for computer and information science and engineering. “We look forward to seeing how US Ignite’s Smart Gigabit Communities project will further NSF’s objectives in collaboration with their community partners in Austin, Chattanooga, Eugene, and Lafayette.”

UL and LCG will collaborate on the Louisiana Smart Community Cloud Platform, which migrates the hardware and software used for research to a regional platform that will provide for high bandwidth/low latency community access.

The Community Cloud will extend to nearby regions. Among the applications supported by the Community Cloud are the Lafayette Engagement and Research Network (LEaRN), the NIMSAT Business Emergency Operations Center, the LA Flood Modeling Project, and others.

“For three years, the NSF-funded [Smart Gigabit Communities] project has focused on the design and development of novel, leading-edge, smart and connected community projects with our SGC partners,” said Smart Gigabit Communities Lead Researcher Glenn Ricart. “With this new component, we’ll support the replication of the best of the best of these applications, showing how they can deliver benefit at scale, and transition to sustainable deployments that boost innovation, economic development, and quality of life.”

Daily Advertiser: https://www.theadvertiser.com/story/news/2020/01/27/lafayette-louisiana-...