CC* NPEO: Toward the National Research Platform

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

Academic researchers need a simple data sharing architecture with end-to-end 10-to-100Gbps performance to enable virtual co-location of large amounts of data with computing. End-to-end is a difficult problem to solve in general because the networks between ends (campuses, data repositories, etc.) typically traverse multiple network management domains: campus, regional, and national. No one organization owns the responsibility for providing scientists with high-bandwidth disk-to-disk performance. Toward the National Research Platform (TNRP), addresses issues critical to scaling end-to-end data sharing. TNRP will instrument a large federation of heterogeneous "national-regional-state" networks (NRSNs) to greatly improve end-to-end network performance across the nation. The goal of improving end-to-end network performance across the nation requires active participation of these distributed intermediate-level entities to reach out to their campuses. They are trusted conveners of their member institutions, contributing effectively to the "people networking" that is as necessary to the development of a full National Research Platform as is the stability, deployment, and performance of technology. TNRP's collaborating NRSNs structure leads to engagement of a large set of science applications, identified by the participating NRSNs and the Open Science Grid. TNRP is highly instrumented to directly measure performance. Visualizations of disk-to-disk performance with passive and active network monitoring show intra- and inter-NSRN end-to-end performance. Internet2, critical for interconnecting regional networks, will provide an instrumented dedicated virtual network instance for the interconnection of TNRP's NRSNs. Cybersecurity is a continuing concern; evaluations of advanced containerized orchestration, hardware crypto engines, and novel IPv6 strategies are part of the TNRP plan. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.