CC-NIE Network Infrastructure: Improving an existing science DMZ

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

Research Computing has been a leader in deploying data movement services to research groups at the University of Colorado Boulder such as Globus Online on a separate network, the RC-DMZ, which is dedicated to high-performance applications and research data transfers. This project implements significant improvements to the RC-DMZ in order to increase the manageability, reliability and bandwidth. This has become necessary driven by the large amount of research in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) that is highly data intensive, with observational and simulation data collections in the tens or hundreds of terabytes (TB), and soon growing to petabytes (PB). The recent "Campus Bridging" task force report also demonstrates the need for continued investment in campus networking capabilities. The upgrades to the RC-DMZ include: * Physical separation between commodity and research traffic through two new border routers * Improved network design by adding redundancy and bandwidth improvement to 20 Gigabit * Active, integrated performance measurements * Security and traffic monitoring * Experimental software defined / OpenFlow Networking Improving the existing RC-DMZ is a collaboration between Research Computing (RC), the departments of Computer Science (CS), Physics, Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology (MCDB), the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), and the Office of Information Technology (OIT) in consultation with other departments and institutes. The network improvements enable better data sharing, and improved access to local, regional and national computational and data resources for all of CU Boulder's researchers.