This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The project will renovate part of the Metropolitan Research and Education Network (MREN). It will provide gateways to forthcoming, next-generation national and international research and education networks and also provide access to customizable services, such as dynamically configurable circuits, for individual research groups. The renovated network infrastructure will support switching for all major high-end network services. Core services will, in general, go directly to photonic interfaces, which will provide a high-capacity, high-performance transport. The primary switch will also support alien waves for interoperability with optics implemented within other research networks that are based on optical transport.
The project will provide infrastructure support for network research, for experimentation with cloud services and other forms of distributed computing, and for large-scale, data-intensive research activities. The latter projects either generate large amounts of data, aggregate large amounts of data, or integrate data from diverse sources. Examples of research fields affected, include high-energy physics, astronomy and astrophysics, climate science, fusion, materials science, proteomics and metabolomics, chemistry, scientific visualization, and, more generally, research that makes use of national-scale high-performance computing and high-throughput computing resources.
By providing infrastructure for research, the project will be to help ensure that universities in the upper Midwest have access to advanced cyberinfrastructure. In addition to basic research, the networking resources will support collaboration between researchers over continental and global distances. They will also support educational activities such as distance learning.
This project designed and implemented a multi-100 Gbps communications exchange facility (StarWave) to support data intensive scientific research, within the StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility, which interconnects all major international, national, regional state-wide and metro area R&E networks as well as all federal agency networks. The StarLight facility functions as the Midwest federal agency network exchange - NGIX. Core components of StarWave include foundation switches based on 100 Gbps standards that have been finalized by international standards organizations, including the IEEE (for 100 GE services and interconnections), the ITU (for 100 Gbps services, interconnections and switching), and the OIF for interconnections. This project was led by the Metropolitan Research and Education Network (MREN), an advanced regional seven state regional R&E network that is exclusively focused on supporting data intensive science research. The project was also led by the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University. However, the project was undertaken as a multi-organizational partnership, comprised of several major research universities and national laboratories, including Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Chicago - all of which are founding members of MREN. With separate funding, 100 Gbps connections have been implemented between the StarLight facility and all of these institutions. The StarWave facility has supported multiple large scale data intensive science experiments and demonstrations, including 100 Gbps international services, and the facility is being prepared to support a number of major 100 Gbps science demonstrations for the SC13 international supercomputing conference.
