The pace of scientific discovery has been rapid in recent years owing to cyberinfrastructures that enable researchers to: (a) remotely access distributed computing resources and big data sets, and (b) effectively collaborate with remote peers, at a global-scale. However, wide-adoption of these advances has been a challenge to researchers mainly due to limitations in traditional cyberinfrastructure equipment, policies and engineering practices at campuses.
This project addresses the adoption challenges for researchers within The Ohio State University (OSU), and for their collaborators at the state, national and international levels. The project team is integrating advanced technologies (e.g., 100Gbps connectivity, perfSONAR, OpenFlow, RoCE/iWARP) relevant to the use cases of diverse OSU researchers in a "Science DMZ" environment. A 100Gbps border router at OSU will be setup to connect to the state-funded OARnet-Internet2 peered 100Gbps network in support of the use cases. The project will investigate the tradeoffs to be balanced between researcher flow performance and campus security practices. Project activities also involve wide-area network experimentation to seamlessly integrate OSU's cyberinfrastructure and Science DMZ with a remote campus (at University of Missouri) cyberinfrastructure. This project will create and document the role of a "Performance Engineer on campus", who will be the primary "keeper" and "help-desk" of the Science DMZ equipment, and will function as a liaison with researchers and their collaborators to configure wide-area cyberinfrastructures. Best-practices are to be published, and open-source software applications will be developed for handling researcher application flows in production networks across diverse science/engineering disciplines and multiple university campuses.
