AmLight: The Next Frontier Towards Discovery in the Americas and Africa

The AmLight: The Next Frontier Towards Discovery in the Americas and Africa project continues its mission to maintain a purpose-built international network infrastructure to support the Vera Rubin Observatory and U.S. astronomy projects, major facilities, scientific workflows, network testbeds, and the R&E communities in the U.S., Latin America, and Africa by maintaining critical long-haul connectivity, colocation, and software services that directly support U.S.-led global science initiatives. The project enhances the network operation and automation to guarantee new levels of observability, programmability, integration with science workflows and testbeds, and data transfer performance. Research contributions include new models for predictive fault detection, telemetry-driven automation, Smart Network Interface-based monitoring, and multi-domain orchestration. These innovations serve as live, reproducible platforms for computer networking, cybersecurity, machine learning, and distributed systems research. The project enables transformational science and education by supporting long-term data-intensive workflows across Latin America and Africa, directly benefiting U.S. access to globally distributed facilities, such as the Vera Rubin Observatory, U.S. astronomy projects, the Large Hadron Collider, and environmental sensing. The project contributes open-source tools; Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable datasets for machine learning and cybersecurity research; and operational telemetry used by national laboratories and academic researchers. By sharing large-scale telemetry data, automation frameworks, and experimental platforms, the project enables broader engagement in reproducible research and infrastructure science. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.