CC-NIE Networking Infrastructure: Accelerating Research Data Transit Between the Scientist's Desktop, Campus, and National Cyberinfrastructure

University Of Notre Dame, Notre Dame IN

Investigators

Abstract

This project accelerates transformative research in numerous data bound STEM fields through acquisition, deployment and efficient sustained operation of high capability research network infrastructure. Notre Dame scientists are too often: working on local systems of insufficient capacity because remote access to national resources is of unreliable performance; deploying 100s of TB of local storage because remote data access is too slow for local computation; moving data between campuses at 10Mbps despite fiber connectivity at 10Gbps; decoupled from access to experimental data taken in disparate campus facilities; or worse, simply not sharing available data due to the complexity and poor reliability of network transfers for their large datasets. In partnership with the University's central enterprise IT organization, the Center for Research Computing identified those unfunded components most critical to science at the University today and essential for supporting the increasingly data centric science of tomorrow. The proposed system addresses the bottlenecks, Accelerating Research Data Transit (ARDT) between the scientist's desktop, campus, and national cyberinfrastructure resources. ARDT extends Notre Dame's current infrastructure with three new components: a new science DMZ that provides an optimized external network path clear of traditional campus network appliances which hinder campus bridging; a new core switch and router for the research data center which adds many more higher speed lower latency uplinks; and endpoint building network upgrades for faculty in engineering, physical, and social sciences providing over 100 10Gb and 500 1Gb new network ports.