About LEARN: Activities & Accomplishments

During the past year, LEARN has continued to build partnerships to enhance the strategic value of LEARN to Texas. LEARN is a very diverse and talented consortium with a history of success, but a focus on the future. Highlights from the past year include:

K-12 Public Schools Use LEARN To Bring Education to Texas Children

The Texas Education Telecommunications Network (TETN) uses the LEARN network to connect the K-12 community across Texas. In accordance with the Texas Education Agency's Long Range Plan for Technology, TETN supports the mission of the Education Service Centers and Independent Schools Districts by providing distance education, virtual field trips, access to global educational activities, and professional development for teachers and administrators. More

Exploring the Fundamental Laws of Physics

LEARN is helping physicists, at Texas institutions of higher education, explore the fundamental laws of physics. Researchers in Texas are working closely with their colleagues throughout the world on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project located near Geneva, Switzerland. During 2011, the LHC project produced many petabytes of new data that physicists are processing at high-performance computing centers distributed worldwide, to search for physics discoveries to solve the mysteries of space, time and mass. These computing centers are connected by advanced networks like LEARN. More

Rice University's Blue BioU Computing Cluster

Researchers at Rice University, in partnership with colleagues in the Texas Medical Center from MD Anderson Cancer Center, Baylor College of Medicine, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, University of Houston and the Methodist Hospital System, are using the Blue BioU high-performance computing cluster and the LEARN network to conduct transformational biomedical research. The acquisition of the Blue BioU computing cluster was supported in part by an award from the IBM Shared University Research Program. More

LEARN Members Partner to Deploy Lonestar 4 Supercomputer

The University of Texas at Austin, in association with the University of Texas System, Texas Tech University, Texas A&M University, the National Science Foundation and several technology partners, deployed the Lonestar 4 supercomputer, as a part of the advanced computing arsenal for the science community in the state of Texas and the nation. Researchers will use the LEARN network, and other advanced networks that are connected with LEARN, to share this strategically important computing resource. More

Texans Play an Important Role in Cancer Research

The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Project involves a national network of research and technology teams working together to collect and store tissue samples, develop molecular characterization and genomic sequencing data, and conduct complex statistical analysis of extremely large data sets. High-performance networks like LEARN play a critical role in enabling these teams to work together, pool the results of their research, and share data to make and validate important discoveries. More

Texas State University System's Strategic Initiative

The Texas State University System (TSUS), founded in 1911, is the first higher education system established in Texas and is comprised of eight higher education institutions stretching from the Texas-Louisiana border to the Big Bend region of West Texas. Connecting all of these institutions together with a high-speed network across such a wide geographic region is no small task. So, when TSUS institutions needed to collaborate with each other on solutions for Commodity Internet access, disaster recovery data replication, and other high-speed network applications, they turned to LEARN. More

Student-Driven Remote Controlled Tours Via VGo Mobile Technology

At the 2011 Waco Education Alliance Summit, representatives from the Baylor University Libraries and the Texas Educational Telecommunications Network (TETN) demonstrated how treasures from the Baylor Libraries could be shared with K-12 children across the state using VGo, a remote mobile video conferencing technology. Baylor plans to take the virtual field trip to a new level by giving K-12 classrooms control of the robot to deliver innovative student driven (literally) curriculum and experiences. More

Preserving and Sharing Digital Archives For Future Generations

The Riley Digitization Center of the Baylor University Library has digitized over 400 terabytes of music, newspapers, athletics materials, scores, maps, historic notebooks and other materials relevant to the Baylor community and to researchers. While these materials are available locally through digitalcollections.baylor.edu, the "dark archive" of this data resides with the Texas Digital Library (TDL) for safekeeping. The LEARN network transports this massive amount of data from Baylor to the TDL. More

XSEDE: Integrating Advanced Resources into a Single Virtual Instrument

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) is an integrated collection of some of the most advanced digital resources and services in the world. The five year, $121 million project that is supported by the National Science Foundation, is a collaboration between key institutions in the United States including the University of Texas at Austin and Rice University. More