HPCwire: Professor Receives $1M in NSF Funding to Develop a High-Speed Networking Testbed

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

October 01, 2009

Professor Receives $1M in NSF Funding to Develop a High-Speed Networking Testbed

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

BATON ROUGE, La., Oct. 1 -- With the rise of high-speed networks such as the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative, or LONI, today's researchers have unprecedented opportunities to collaborate across institutions. These networks allow rapid communication and data transferring, so scientists working at research institutions in different states, or even different countries, can work on the same project together in real time.

While multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional research now takes place frequently as more facilities gain access to high-speed networks, limitations still exist. Only a certain number of users can access a network at a time, and multiple users create bottlenecks, which slow the overall speed. Researchers also cannot easily modify a network's capabilities to suit their individual needs without creating problems for other research projects on that network. And, the overall research community lacks applications that operate consistently across network connections.

LSU Professor Seung-Jong "Jay" Park will address these limitations through two projects he is leading at the University to make research across high-speed networks, which can transport 10 Giga bits of data per second (Gbps), more efficient and available to more users.

Park, an assistant professor in the LSU Department of Computer Science who holds a joint appointment with the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, has received $1 million in total funding from the National Science Foundation to support this work.

Park's two projects are Development of a Cyberinfrastructure of Reconfigurable Optical Networks, or CRON, for Large-Scale Multidisciplinary Scientific Research, funded through the foundation's Major Research Instrumentation Program, and Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI.

CRON and a federation project with GENI are overlapping projects. Through CRON, Park will work with a research team including Professors Thomas Sterling, Department of Computer Science and CCT, Sitharama Iyengar, Department of Computer Science and CCT, Rajgopal Kannan, Department of Computer Science and CCT, and Daniel S. Katz, Computation Institute at University of Chicago and affiliated faculty member with CCT and the LSU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, to develop new hardware and software components for 10Gbps high-speed networking. These tools will allow 10Gbps networks to accommodate more users at a time without reducing speed or processing power.

The federation project with GENI will integrate the developing CRON testbed with other testbeds around the country, moving toward a more integrated, worldwide environment to aid research for future Internet activity. Through GENI, networks will connect and share applications more efficiently, making it easier for researchers working through different networks to adapt this technology to suit their specific needs without disrupting other users.

"Through this research, we are improving on existing high-speed networking technology to create a collaborative and exploratory virtual laboratory that allows academia, industry and the public to work more effectively toward groundbreaking discoveries and innovation," Park said. "We hope the applications we develop will provide a prototype for what next-generation Internet and networking capabilities should be."

The CRON project began in August 2008, and the GENI project begins Oct. 1. The National Science Foundation has funded CRON and GENI for three years.

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

C-DAC announces plans for a petaflop system; IBM researchers are working on vertical integration techniques to extend Moore's Law another 15 years. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations

The Moscow State University supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of tripling its processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.
Read More...

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html