Powerful networks are the thread that holds together the computing and data resources that underpin modern scientific discovery. With the ever-increasing demands on bandwidth to support the analysis of the ever-growing volumes of scientific data, this project will transition the University of Wisconsin - Madison (UW-Madison) research community to a new era of networking technologies and capabilities.
Software Defined Network (SDN) technologies will be employed to establish the UW-Madison science DMZ that will support up to 100Gb/sec data transfer rate to universities and research institutions across the US through Internet2. Integral to this new campus wide resource will be the ability to use emerging networking protocols like OpenFlow to dynamically provision communication bandwidth between departmental resources and the campus DMZ.
A new campus wide team of both central IT and research staff will facilitate the deployment and operation of these new capabilities. This Advanced Network Team (ANT) will be responsible for the integration of the new networking and software capabilities with the UW CyberInfrastructure. An important element of the ANT activity will be to monitor networking activities on the campus and guide research and development of new distributed computing technologies.
Broader impacts: This will benefit all campus scholarly activities including other NSF sponsored projects, activities funded by other federal agencies, and other campus scholarship including the social sciences, humanities, and arts. The expertise gained will be disseminated throughout the UW System, the Committee for Institutional Cooperation, and the WiscNet regional network, which serves higher education, K-12, and public libraries.
