This University of Kentucky CC-NIE Integration project is focused on the ever-growing demands for improved cyberinfrastructure to support data-intensive scientific research. This project, a partnership led by UK Information Technology using technology and services from UK Computer Science, the Laboratory for Advanced Networking, and the UK Center for Computational Sciences, provides software-defined network (SDN) infrastructure and control to UK researchers and affiliates. The project not only upgrades network components, it also provides a programmable network infrastructure tailored to the needs of researchers. Separation of UK research traffic from administrative and academic traffic enables research traffic to avoid the institutional policy constraints currently placed on all traffic.
The resulting SDN network will have a lasting impact on research projects spanning a wide range of areas including astrophysics, bio-medical, computer vision, visualization, and networking research. The most obvious improvement will be enhanced capacity for data-intensive research applications, with transmission speeds of up to 10 Gbps at the research access layer, 10 Gbps from the distribution layer to the UK research core, and 10+ Gbps from the research core to Internet2 and the regional networks (KyRON and KPEN). In addition, system administrators will be able to apply fine-grained control and prioritization of traffic across the campus backbone. It will also enable end-to-end user-defined provisioning of network access and capacity so that each research project can obtain precisely the performance it requires of the network. Finally, being integrated with the GENI network will enable researchers to access additional resources all across the GENI network.
