The OneOklahoma Friction Free Network (OFFN) is a collaboration among four Oklahoma institutions that have significant High Performance Computing resources available for academic research: the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University, the Tandy Supercomputing Center of the Oklahoma Innovation Institute, and Langston University, Oklahoma's only Historically Black University, along with OneNet, Oklahoma's education, research and government information and telecommunications network.
Triggered by research needs in high energy physics, numerical weather prediction, bioinformatics and weather radar, but available for researchers across all Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines statewide, OFFN serves as a crucial component of the OneOklahoma Cyberinfrastructure Initiative (OneOCII), which provides resources and services to researchers and educators across the state, and which has so far has served almost 100 institutions and organizations, approximately half of them academic.
The project addresses key national Cyberinfrastructure priorities, specifically deployment of friction free networking and software defined networking capabilities. Objectives include:
1. Deploy and maintain, at the four institutions, a research-only network consisting of institutional last mile components that are independent of enterprise networks, with its internal hub collocated with OneNet.
2. Apply Software Defined Networking across OFFN, facilitating end-to-end management, by researchers, of high bandwidth/high performance data flows through a distributed hierarchy of open standards tools, giving researchers a new layer of transparency into network transport.
3. Provide these capabilities -- OFFN's in particular and OneOCII's in general -- to all relevant researchers and educators statewide, and facilitate their use.
