The University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) is home to leading research centers in a number of areas, including astrophysics, genomics, earth and planetary science, and particle physics. Being aggressive adopters of computational components in their research programs, these centers all have current and growing requirements for high-performance networking. These research activities involve the transfer of big data across the network, and are currently limited by UCSC's connectivity to regional, national, and international research networks. The motivation for this project is to re-architect UCSC's research network so that it is optimized for these high performance scientific applications.
To better support these big data research activities UCSC adds a Science DMZ component to the UCSC network that is optimized for high-performance applications. The Science DMZ is a portion of the campus network that segregates these big science data flows from production network traffic. UCSC is provisioning 100 Gb/s external connectivity from the Science DMZ to regional, national, and international research networks, and 10 Gb/s to the computational infrastructure supporting these projects. UCSC is deploying enhanced measurement and monitoring capabilities to ensure optimal use of the new infrastructure, and the experimental OpenFlow technology to enable experiments in enhanced services for these users. To ensure researchers are able to make optimal use of the new services UCSC dedicates network engineering personnel to act as a bridge between the researchers and central campus IT staff to ensure researchers make maximal use of the new infrastructure.
