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Purdue awarded two NSF grants to enhance networking for research

  • Science Highlights

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure has recently awarded Purdue University two new Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) grants. The two awards, totaling nearly $1.5 million, will directly address and enhance the cyberinfrastructure at Purdue University.

CC* awards Image descriptionare given to teams who are seeking to partake in coordinated campus-level cyberinfrastructure improvements, innovation, integration, and engineering for science applications and distributed research projects. There are five different program areas that CC* awards support. The first award falls under Area 1, networking infrastructure. This award was for a project titled “Enhancing network connectivity for data-intensive, multi-institution collaborative science.” Arman Pazouki, the Director of Scientific Application at RCAC, is the Principal Investigator (PI) for the project.

The network infrastructure project will enhance Purdue University’s external connectivity to the world, delivering fast networking for data-intensive research within Purdue, and extending connectivity to under-served research facilities. It will accomplish this by connecting Purdue to Indiana GigaPOP and the ESnet network with a 400 Gbps wide-area network. These network expansions will position Purdue to address data challenges in cutting-edge research and enable emerging research, such as artificial intelligence, across several disciplines. By fully leveraging Internet2’s fifth-generation backbone as well as the 400 Gbps transatlantic Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Open Network Environment, this project will empower Purdue research centers, including the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Tier-2 center and the Institute for Sustainable Future, to continue to lead international data-intensive research. With this upgrade, the Purdue CMS Tier-2 center will be positioned to support the High Luminosity LHC project that is expected to accumulate an exabyte of new raw data each year. Furthermore, the project provides fast connectivity to Purdue research farms, Agronomy, and Animal sciences to support emerging science in under-served facilities. The project will also expand Purdue’s science DMZ to enable high-bandwidth, low-latency communication required for real-time video analytics and public-private partnerships within the Purdue Discovery Park District. Several educational and workforce development activities, including formal training and mentorship, are included in the project to engage undergraduate students in the deployment and operation of network infrastructure and support experiential and residential learning programs on Purdue’s campus. “The amount of data generated and used by researchers,” says Pazouki, “will continue to grow exponentially thanks to compute powerhouses, advanced research equipment, and new research methods involving AI. The 4-20X speedup in the networking bandwidth and new network paths laid out by this project will connect Purdue researchers to international collaborators at top speed and help sustain Purdue’s leadership in several flagship disciplines.”

The second award falls under Area 3, Network Integration and Applied Innovation. The project, titled “Programmable Network Testbed for 400 Gbps Science DMZ,” is led by Professor Sanjay Rao of the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). Erik Gough, a Senior Research Scientist at RCAC, is a co-PI for the project and will lead the testbed deployment and its integration into RCAC’s network infrastructure. Professor Vishal Shrivastav of ECE and Professor Muhammad Shahbaz of the Department of Computer Science (CS) will also serve as co-PIs on the project.

Rao, Shahbaz, and Shrivastav (who, along with other faculty in CS and ECE, have founded the PurNET Lab to synergize computer networking research across campus) are leaders in programmable networking, an exciting new area of research that enables network architects to program operations to be performed on each data packet. The research can enable next-generation networks that are agile and can respond in real time (e.g., to thwart cyber-attacks and to support low-latency applications).

The network integration project will design, implement, and deploy PRONET, a testbed to support cutting-edge programmable networking research for managing Science DMZ traffic. The current data storage and transfer needs of science drivers such as high energy physics far exceeds regular campus traffic. As these needs continue to grow, monitoring and managing research networks becomes ever more challenging. PRONET will enable (i) real-time monitoring of Terabits per second of traffic for tasks such as security and performance; (ii) enable complex processing at network line rate to support both current Science DMZ use cases (e.g., detect security attacks) and emerging ones (e.g., process IoT traffic); and (iii) validation of programmable networking research on real-world traffic. The project will influence future Science DMZ designs by demonstrating use cases of programmable networking in these environments and will drive the adoption of programmable networking, leading to more secure, reliable, and agile network environments. Like the first CC* award, this project will also aid in workforce development by involving students—both graduate and undergraduate—and the PIs will work to actively recruit students from underrepresented groups.

“I am excited to collaborate with RCAC and Purdue IT”, says Rao, “as it enables networking researchers to tackle high-impact real-world problems, and to validate futuristic research ideas at scale. The unique PRONET testbed will cement Purdue as one of the top universities for programmable networking research.”

“Through this collaboration with ECE,” says Gough,” we will be able to demonstrate the power of programmable networking in Science DMZ environments. This testbed will have a lasting impact on networking research at Purdue and pave the way for more secure and agile research networks.”

Preston Smith, Executive Director of RCAC, is a co-PI on both projects. Smith had this to say: “While it's less flashy than the computing and data resources that usually get top billing, advanced networking is a critical component of a campus cyberinfrastructure. We’re excited to enhance Purdue’s capabilities for enabling data-intensive science both internationally, across the state of Indiana, and into networking research itself, with NSF’s support.”

The two CC* awards are funded under NSF award numbers 2346718 and 2346605. To learn more about High-Performance Computing, please visit our “Why HPC?” page. To stay up-to-date on all RCAC projects and updates, please visit our “News” page.

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu

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