CC-NIE Integration: Multi-Wave - A Dedicated Data Transport Ring to Support 21st Century Computational Research

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

Multi-Wave deploys new cyber-physical infrastructure on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, at the Massachusetts High-Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), and at two collocation sites (1 Federal Street, Springfield, MA and 300 Bent Street, Cambridge, MA) to build a dedicated multi-lambda transport ring between the sites and to provide researchers with a dedicated high-bandwidth network. This new infrastructure allows research traffic to be isolated from the mix of other information by dedicating one of two wavelengths for the research network only. All other traffic is transported on the other wavelength. This new cyber-physical infrastructure is supporting research in the areas of big data and genomics, remote sensing, biostatics, planetary science, distributed systems and software defined networking, and climate science. Besides offering a reliable, high-bandwidth transport ring for researchers in computational sciences, the new cyberinfrastructure is also designed to integrate well into the existing, nation-wide Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) testbed. This project will significantly impact researchers at UMass Amherst who are dealing with very large data sets. The new cyber-physical infrastructure will allow these researchers to transport large data sets between sources on and off campus to the MGHPCC, where significant computing resources are housed. For example, genomics researchers will be able to transmit very high volumes of data from storage systems at a sequencing center to the computing cluster at MGHPCC, instead of physically shipping hard drives via express mail as they do now.