EIN: Collaborative Research: End-To-End Provisioned Optical Network Testbed for Large-Scale eScience Applications

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This proposal is a comprehensive effort to develop the infrastructure and networking technologies to support a broad class of eScience projects and specifically the Terascale Supernova Initiative. The proposed work will build a high-performance, experimental, optical network infrastructure that supports: (a) on-demand provisioning of end-to-end high-speed circuits, (b) stable transport to sustain control and streaming operations, and (c) middleware and application software to support data transfers, visualization, steering and control.Intellectual Merit: Through a vertical integration of these components, the researchers plan to demonstrate how a large-scale eScience application, such as TSI, can fully exploit the benefits of optical networks. The team consists of optical networking researchers, transport-layer and middleware researchers, and radio-astronomy scientists. Successful completion of this project will allow the Awardee to determine the benefits and costs of creating a backbone high-speed shared circuit-switched network along the same lines as the two packet-switched Internet2 backbone networks, Abilene and vBNS.Broader impact: Due to the broad spectrum of target eScience applications, the project should have a broad societal impact. Given the diverse team of researchers on this project, results should be disseminated in various research communities rapidly and increase the level of interest in this approach. This project significantly leverages various resources at the universities and ORNL. Students from these universities will be provided access to computational and network resources at ORNL, in terms of supercomputers and high-bandwidth links. Also, this work will be used to provide projects to students from DOE educational programs, which support undergraduate and graduate students from universities across the country. This project will specifically include summer students from ORNL's Research Alliance for Minorities program.