The University of Central Florida (UCF) is extending a newly formed dedicated research network to three buildings on the main campus and deploying the Internet2 Innovation Platform on the research network. This project is providing on-campus researchers access to a Science DMZ, software-defined networking (including OpenFlow), and 10 Gb/s ports at their desktops. This enables labs with data-intensive research in departments such as Physics and Computer Science to use a dedicated research network, avoiding competition for bandwidth with other traffic on UCF's enterprise network. Additionally, UCF is installing perfSonar nodes to help monitor traffic on the research network, as well as a node to serve as an OpenFlow controller for software defined networking.
These improvements to UCF's cyberinfrastructure improve access for faculty, graduate student researchers, and undergraduates to facilities in the Central Florida Research Park, such as the STOKES Advanced Research Computing Center. It also improves access to Florida LambdaRail (FLR), which enhances collaboration with a variety of institutions throughout Florida. This effort establishes the foundation of a dedicated research network, which helps UCF continue to align itself with the National Science Foundation's CI vision for discovery by working to provide the science and engineering communities with access to world-class CI tools and services, including those focused on: high performance computing; data, data analysis and visualization; observatories and virtual organizations; and education and workforce development.
This NSF-funded project enabled the University of Central Florida's Institute for Simulation & Training (IST) in concert with UCF's Computer Services & Telecommunications (CS&T) to deploy a dedicated, high-speed research network at UCF. The network is entirely separate from the UCF enterprise network, maintains equipment capable of 10 gigbits per second (Gpbs) from border router to wall jack, and connects directly to Internet2 via Florida Lambda Rail. The network has both SDN (software defined networking) and non-SDN capable vlans, and it already connects existing computational resources in UCF's College of Sciences, School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, and IST. The project has also enabled IST to stand up a new data-transfer server for moving data quickly to our mid-scale high performance computing (HPC) cluster via the research network using Globus/GridFTP. In addition, there are three PerfSONAR nodes at UCF on the research network: one at IST, one at the College of Sciences, and one at CS&T's network core. We have conducted a number of performance tests over the research network and verified that the real bandwidth of servers within the UCF research network is consistently close to 10 Gbps (9.1 Gpbs on average). The network will enable a number of scientific tasks, primarily the movement of large quantities of data to and from facilities such as UCF's HPC, which is housed at IST. The SDN vlan gives UCF the opportunity to explore more fundamental questions of how such a dedicated network can be optimized for data-intensive research activities.
