CC*DNI Networking Infrastructure: A Dedicated High-Speed Campus Research Network

University Of Alabama At Birmingham, Birmingham AL

Investigators

Abstract

In order to accommodate the ever-increasing demand for transferring large amounts of data generated by various instruments and computational simulations, the focus of this project is to develop a dedicated high-speed research network at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). This networking infrastructure provides researchers at UAB with 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) connections from selected computers to the shared computational facility. It accelerates campus data transfers at least 10-fold and provides access to 10 Gbps data transfer rates for researchers downloading/uploading large datasets from external data repositories and national computational resources such as XSEDE and Open Science Grid through the campus Internet2 connection. Network performance is monitored using perfSONAR and high-speed data transfer is supported through the use of dedicated data transfer nodes. This infrastructure is also used to explore Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technologies. This high-speed research network provides researchers and their graduate students with faster access to state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure, thereby accelerating their research and improving their research productivity. Several important research activities in Biology, Physics, Material Science, Image Analysis, Cloud Computing, and Biomedical Engineering are enabled by this infrastructure and each project offers significant societal impacts in their respective areas of science and engineering. Underlying these efforts are UAB's strong commitments to a diverse student body and faculty, and long-term commitments by individual faculty involved in this project to training, mentoring, and recruiting women and underrepresented groups into science and engineering.