ARI: Enhancing MREN Optical Communications Infrastructure for e-Science

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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.