The Trojan Express Network II (TEN-II) project at the University of Southern California (USC) builds on existing network infrastructure to provide the next generation of network services. TEN-II enables significant new scientific research and education opportunities for multiple departments and research groups. Examples include projects that need access to large data flows from remote instruments, transfer of large data sets to or from national computing centers or cloud-based providers, and multi-institutional research and education collaborations that rely on the transfer of large data sets between partners in a timely and reliable manner.
Scientific research and education continues to be ever more data and compute intensive, and the demand for higher performance and more reliable data transfer will continue to grow over the next decade. The project is deploying a parallel network over existing fiber infrastructure to provide high data-rate services to at least 6 research laboratories across 3 facilities of the university that are geographically dispersed around Los Angeles. The network is operated using Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology and provides access to the campus high-performance computing facility and to other institutions over regional, national, and international advanced research and education networks. TEN-II authenticates the use of the infrastructure based on users' credentials that are currently used to access other IT services and interfaces with similar mechanisms under development by regional and national networks.
