This proposal will be awarded using funds made available by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5), and meets the requirements established in Section 2 of the White House Memorandum entitled, Ensuring Responsible Spending of Recovery Act Funds, dated March 20, 2009.
Abstract - The Taj: A New Model for Global Federated Network Infrastructure for Science and Education Greg Cole, University of Tennessee Jerry Sobieski, NORDUnet Jun Li, CSTnet, Chinese Academy of Sciences
This two-year $2.3M project will leverage ~$11M in funding and gratis contributions to broadly support the U.S. research, engineering, and educational community and its international collaborators. The project is named the Taj in honor of the significant contributions from the Tata Corporation in India. By dramatically improving network infrastructure around the northern hemisphere, the Taj program promises far-reaching and sustainable benefits in global research and education (R&E) collaboration. The Taj will serve nearly every science discipline and offer a user-focused, performance-based network responsive to demands of a globally integrated, infrastructure aware community of scientists, engineers, teachers, and students. It will enable global open science collaboration in an era of constrained resources via carefully organized collaboration and co-funding with public and private sectors in Europe and Asia. The Taj program is new, yet it efficiently builds on the GLORIAD network infrastructure which connects U.S., China, and Russia, as well as Korea, Canada, Netherlands and the five Nordic countries.
The Taj will connect the exchange points in Hong Kong, Singapore, Mumbai, Alexandria (Egypt), and Europe, extending U.S. access to India, Egypt, & SE Asia, including likely connections to Vietnam and possibly North & East Africa. It expands U.S.-China connection through the Pacific by a factor of 4, to 10 Gbps, offering greater capacity for U.S. collaborations with India and across SE Asia, and providing new equipment to enable better deployment of hybrid services for more advanced science applications. The Taj will deploy a new high-capacity circuit connecting the U.S. with Greenland and the 5 Nordic countries, serving polar, climate change, cyberinfrastructure and other research, and expand U.S.-Russia capacity through a proposed Nordic infrastructure to St. Petersburg. This network promises a new model of distributed, decentralized network measurement, security and management tools, and software for newly-connected India & SE Asia, and for existing communities in U.S., Asia, and Europe. This model enables easy sharing of global network management tasks and focuses on user-level performance.
Intellectual Merit: The Taj program advances global cyberinfrastructure services and metrics, broadens the global community working on measuring and mitigating customer-based infrastructure performance, and introduces a new model of distributed, decentralized management of cyberinfrastructure resources. The additional connectivity and bandwidth will allow greater access to cutting edge research in India and SE Asia, and will advance research in pragmatic network deployments and operations. The performance tools that will be deployed are extensible and novel in approach, and have the possibility to strongly impact R&E network deployments.
Broader Impacts: Taj's greatest impact lies in its contributions to Infrastructure for Research and Education. India and SE Asia alone will dramatically expand the current user base of 9 million R&E host systems logged by GLORIAD, and significant user growth worldwide. The Taj expansion will benefit U.S. and global research by bringing some of the world's brightest minds into the advanced networks R&E arena. The decentralized model for managing global cyber-infrastructure resources is Taj's most important legacy. Taj is built upon a long track record of fostering global partnerships between public-private entities that address major science problems such as Climate Change, Cybersecurity, Early Warning Systems, Global Public Health, Renewable and Alternative Energy.
Overarching goals: strengthen cyberinfrastructure in the northern hemisphere; broaden U.S. access to under-served science communities; promote distributed, decentralized, secure approach to network management; improve operations and user experience through solid metrics for utilization, performance and security; improve cyberinfrastructure awareness and proficiency of end-users.
This project is jointly supported by the NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure and Office of International Science and Engineering, the Tata Communications, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Nordic Research Council.
This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
