December 16, 2010
Dec. 16 -- The LSU Advanced Networking Lab (LANET) has developed a new cyberinfrastructure environment to bridge the gap between physical networks and large-scale scientific discovery. This new-age system called "CRON" (Cyberinfrastructure of Reconfigurable Optical Networking) can provide multiple virtual networking testbeds consisting of routers, delay links, and high-end workstations operating up to 10Gbps bandwidth.
"CRON will give application developers and networking researchers the ability to use virtual high-speed networks and computing environments without much technical knowledge," said Seung-Jong Park, associate professor of LSU's Department of Computer Science and the Center for Computation & Technology. "The system also enables large-scale scientific experiments to share CRON without mutual interference," said Park.
LSU's state-of-the-art computer data network, connecting to the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI), and national cyber-backbones -- like Internet2, National Lambda Rail (NLR) -- provides high-speed connectivity to the research communities. This allows them to handle very large amounts of data critical to a variety of disciplines. In the past several years, LSU's Network 2010 initiative invested in upgrading the core campus network, creating a research-enabling network infrastructure to at a level of capability available only at the most elite research labs and institutions in the world.
CRON provides integrated and automated access to a wide range of high speed networking configurations, such as NLR, Internet2, and LONI. CRON can also allow users to dynamically reconfigure computing resources, operating systems, middleware and applications based on their specific needs. Because of the automated and reconfigurable characteristics, all types of experiments over CRON will be repeatable and controllable.
"With the CRON project, LSU researchers will be able to extend the benefits of its very high-speed research connectivity deep into their research by dynamically accessing different high speed networks and computing resources depending on their demands," said Joel Tohline, the director of the Center for Computation & Technology and professor of LSU's Department of Physics & Astronomy. "A large number of LSU researchers can take advantage of those virtually created high speed networking and computing environments and use the tools developed by CRON to advance science discovery."
The LANET group, led by LSU Associate Professor Seung-Jong Park, focuses their research activities on evaluation and development of networking protocols and designing simulators for heterogeneous large-scale networks consisting of wireless networks and high-speed optical networks. The National Science Foundation (NSF) provided funding for the CRON project.
For more information about CRON or other research from the LANET group, visit: http://cron.cct.lsu.edu/.
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Source: LSU Center for Computation & Technology
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