This project develops an infrastructure to support managing the transfer and analysis of big data as required by several projects at the University of California at Davis. For example, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Project will soon produce 30 terabytes of data each night. Scientists at UC Davis examine the data, testing new search and analysis algorithms to find new or unexpected phenomena. This collaborative project requires high-speed connections to the other 22 institutions involved in the project. Similarly, the Genome project and other projects benefit, or will shortly benefit, from the changes being made to the internal networking infrastructure.
The project also provides data for campus research groups that study networks. For example, the Robust and Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory and the Computer Security Laboratory use network traffic and performance measurements in their research, and the enhancements to the network enable them to gather this data in ways that do not violate University privacy regulations. Further, the network architecture enables administrative staff to deploy enhanced monitoring capabilities to detect network traffic problems. Support personnel including undergraduates act as a bridge between the research projects using this enhanced network and the network managers, so researchers can obtain the optimum network performance that they need, and the network itself can be tuned as appropriate to minimize overhead.
