As a first step in building a community of 100Gbs campuses and best practices in science and engineering research applications supported across this infrastructure, Clemson Univerity proposes to host two workshops that will bring together stakeholders from ten academic institutions across the country in a sustained dialogue to develop and refine a model for coordinated infrastructure aggregation that connects campuses via the forthcoming Internet2 Innovation platform. These workshops will result in a shared agreement, governance structure, and roadmap to be reported back to the NSF and broader community.
Participants will discuss strategies and required infrastructure to leverage the Internet2 innovation platform with its 100Gb/s backbone to connect campuses and allow high performance interconnections that can be built and broken down in ad-hoc ways using OpenFlow. The recommended strategies to build these connections coupled with the consortium's community building characteristics will serve as a model for "team science" that other institutions can follow.
As a result of these workshops, the project will develop a strategy and roadmap for leveraging NSF investments on campuses around the country and enabling science and education deployments that are not possible today.
This project hosted a series of workshops designed to develop a strategy to build a community of advanced computing practitioners that will work together to share the resources, knowledge, and expertise that NSF has invested in across the involved campuses. Participants at the workshops discussed the strategies and required infrastructure needed to leverage the Internet2 innovation platform with its 100Gb/s backbone to connect campuses and allow high performance interconnections that can be built and broken down in ad- hoc ways using OpenFlow. It is envisioned that the strategies identified and recommended by participants in the workshops will serve as a model for ‘team science’ that other institutions can follow. Putting campus IT, regional networks, Internet2 and the community at the same table negotiating projects interactively will create new possibilities that today take years to deploy. The primary objective of this project was to establish the Condo of Condos consortium, which will bring together education and research institutions that are committed to the vision of advancing scientific discovery through a national network of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Research and Education Facilitators (ACI-REFs). Working together in a coordinated effort, the consortium is dedicated to the adoption of models and strategies to leverage the expertise and experiences of its members to maximize the impact of the investment in research computing. Located on the campuses and fully embedded in their local environment, the mission of the ACI-REFs will be to extend the reach and impact of campus and national research computing infrastructure on the science conducted by students and faculty. The ACI-REFs will build bridges that facilitate effective communication between the researchers on one hand and the providers of campus, and national resources on the other. Through these bridges they will assist researchers from all disciplines in understanding their computing and data needs and in mapping these needs to existing capabilities. These bridges will also enable them to guide the deployment of new software and hardware capabilities. Through a network of personal connections and joint activities they will form a much-needed network of knowledge and best practices. By engaging in sustained and individualized interactions, the ACI-REFs will help researchers leverage campus resources as seamless interfaces to national ACI resources such as XSEDE and the Open Science Grid (OSG). And, perhaps most significantly, they will help broaden and expand the number of researchers to become empowered and self-sufficient users of these local and national ACI resources, allowing them to focus on making research discoveries.
