CC*DNI DIBBs: The Pacific Research Platform

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

Research in data-intensive fields is increasingly multi-investigator and multi-institutional, depending on ever more rapid access to ultra-large heterogeneous and widely distributed datasets. The Pacific Research Platform (PRP) is a multi-institutional extensible deployment that establishes a science-driven high-capacity data-centric 'freeway system.' The PRP spans all 10 campuses of the University of California, as well as the major California private research universities, four supercomputer centers, and several universities outside California. Fifteen multi-campus data-intensive application teams act as drivers of the PRP, providing feedback to the technical design staff over the five years of the project. These application areas include particle physics, astronomy/astrophysics, earth sciences, biomedicine, and scalable multimedia, providing models for many other applications. The PRP builds on prior NSF and Department of Energy (DOE) investments. The basic model adopted by the PRP is 'The Science DMZ,' being prototyped by the DOE ESnet. (A Science DMZ is defined as 'a portion of the network, built at or near the campus local network perimeter that is designed such that the equipment, configuration, and security policies are optimized for high-performance scientific applications rather than for general-purpose business systems'). In the last three years, NSF has funded over 100 U.S. campuses through Campus Cyberinfrastructure - Network Infrastructure and Engineering (CC-NIE) grants to aggressively upgrade their network capacity for greatly enhanced science data access, creating Science DMZs within each campus. The PRP partnership extends the NSF-funded campus Science DMZs to a regional model that allows high-speed data-intensive networking, facilitating researchers moving data between their laboratories and their collaborators' sites, supercomputer centers or data repositories, and enabling that data to traverse multiple heterogeneous networks without performance degradation over campus, regional, national, and international distances. The PRP's data sharing architecture, with end-to-end 10-40-100Gb/s connections, provides long-distance virtual co-location of data with computing resources, with enhanced security options.