Research Computing has been a leader in deploying data movement services to research groups at the University of Colorado Boulder such as Globus Online on a separate network, the RC-DMZ, which is dedicated to high-performance applications and research data transfers. This project implements significant improvements to the RC-DMZ in order to increase the manageability, reliability and bandwidth. This has become necessary driven by the large amount of research in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) that is highly data intensive, with observational and simulation data collections in the tens or hundreds of terabytes (TB), and soon growing to petabytes (PB). The recent "Campus Bridging" task force report also demonstrates the need for continued investment in campus networking capabilities. The upgrades to the RC-DMZ include:
* Physical separation between commodity and research traffic through two new border routers * Improved network design by adding redundancy and bandwidth improvement to 20 Gigabit * Active, integrated performance measurements * Security and traffic monitoring * Experimental software defined / OpenFlow Networking
Improving the existing RC-DMZ is a collaboration between Research Computing (RC), the departments of Computer Science (CS), Physics, Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology (MCDB), the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), and the Office of Information Technology (OIT) in consultation with other departments and institutes. The network improvements enable better data sharing, and improved access to local, regional and national computational and data resources for all of CU Boulder's researchers.
The Research Computing (RC) group at the University of Colorado Bolder is a leader in deploying data movement services to research groups at CU-Boulder using a separate network, the RC-ScienceDMZ, which is dedicated to high-performance applications and research data transfers. In this project significant improvements to the RC-ScienceDMZ were implemented that increased the manageability, reliability and bandwidth of this network. The upgrades to the RC-ScienceDMZ included: Physical separation between commodity and research traffic through the installation of two new border routers. Improved network design by adding redundancy and bandwidth improvements of up to 80 Gbps. The core of the network was upgraded using two new switches that are connected with an aggregate bandwidth of 80 Gpbs. Key facilities like the High Performance Computing Facility and the PetaLibaray, a centralized storage system for research data, are connected to the core with 40 Gbps to enable fast data transfers. Active, integrated performance measurements for end-to-end performance monitoring and diagonstics. Traffic monitoring by using the open-source traffic analyser Bro. Exploring software defined / OpenFlow networking. The network improvements enable faster data transfers, and improved access to local, regional and national computational and data resources for all of CU-Boulder's researchers. The network architecture of the RC-ScienceDMZ is shown in the attached image. The RC-ScienceDMZ is a key infrastructure to support data intensive research at CU-Boulder. Improving the existing RC-ScienceDMZ was a collaboration between RC, the departments of Computer Science, Physics, Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, the National Snow and Ice Data Center, and the Office of Information Technology in consultation with other departments and institutes.
