This project further enables UCLA's computational research community by fusing the campus' Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE) Research Data Center with its second generation Science DMZ network. UCLA has maintained an innovative campus backbone network through implementation of a Science DMZ for over a decade. This approach has enabled high performance networking across campus and provides individual schools, departments, centers and laboratories to choose the level of connectivity that serves their specific needs and resources. This approach has ignited researcher demand for continuously increasing cyber infrastructure (CI) capability in compute, storage, visualization and both internal and external collaborative tools. In response, UCLA has designed and implemented its second generation, software defined networking capable (SDN), 40/100 gigabit Science DMZ network.
This project directly integrates the second generation Science DMZ with the IDRE Research Data Center, home of shared high performance research computing and storage on campus. Direct high capacity connectivity between researchers, local research instruments, the computational resources of the IDRE Research Data Center and external national and international resources and collaborators is integral to the next generation of research at UCLA. The set of UCLA research projects enabled by this work includes: molecular biologists manipulating raw sequencing data; genetics researchers sharing and archiving large data sets; and physicists running plasma simulations some of the country's largest supercomputers.
This connectivity is achieved via a high performance 40/100 gigabit layer 2 switching infrastructure. High performance Layer 2 network connectivity allows researchers to take full direct advantage of the network?s capacity while pushing slower elements like routing and security to the larger Science DMZ edge, where it is available, but only when needed.
