New discoveries in science and engineering research in the 21st century arise from the creation, analysis and communication of staggering amounts of data. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) are at the forefront of Big Data research and thus continually pushing the university's network infrastructure. The creation of the Washington University Research Network is a critical step forward in providing the necessary hardware and software capabilities to enable Petabytes of data to move into and out of university systems. However, the capability of genomics, imaging and planetary science (to name a few) instruments to generate new data is increasing exponentially and can quickly outpace the capacity of any network.
The project creates a Software Defined Network (SDN) based distributed Science DMZ network on the WUSTL campus across three existing data centers linked to each other and research and education wide area network connections via dedicated 40Gbps hardware in the existing campus core. The key contribution of this project is to deploy new techniques in SDN that optimize the way existing and future capacity is utilized, while also ensuring the necessary monitoring oversight needed for predictable and secure operation. By scheduling large data transfers and intelligently partitioning and sharing network capacity, the project's goal is to ensure near optimal utilization of resources and provide a cost effective solution. Network programmability is also leveraged to dynamically instantiate monitoring resources that oversee the security of those transfers.
