| NSF Org: |
OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | July 13, 2010 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | June 7, 2017 |
| Award Number: | 0963053 |
| Award Instrument: | Cooperative Agreement |
| Program Manager: |
Kevin Thompson
kthompso@nsf.gov (703)292-4220 OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | July 1, 2010 |
| End Date: | June 30, 2018 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $5,463,381.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $7,744,790.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2011 = $4,849,189.00 FY 2013 = $1,798,091.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
11200 SW 8TH ST MIAMI FL US 33199-2516 (305)348-2494 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
11200 SW 8TH ST MIAMI FL US 33199-2516 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | International Res Ret Connect |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001112DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001213DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001314DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001415DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
The project team intends Americas Lightpaths (AmLight) to enable research and education amongst the people of the Americas through the operation of production infrastructure for communication and collaboration between the US and Western Hemisphere science and engineering research and education communities. Four links are proposed to tie together the major research networks of five of the larger countries in the Americas: Brazil, Canada, Chile, Mexico, and the United States. In addition, this work will enable interconnects between the United States and the Latin American regional network of RedCLARA, which enables connectivity to 18 Latin American national research and education networks.
The effort is fundamentally collaborative, includingg AURA, ANSP, RNP, CENIC, AtlanticWave, PacificWave, ANSP, CUDI, RedCLARA, and REUNA. Through AtlanticWave and PacificWave, there will be production connectivity and peering to North American backbone networks Internet2, National Lambda Rail (NLR), ESnet, and CANARIE. Through RedCLARA, there will be production connectivity to thirteen national research and education networks with plans to expand to eighteen NRENs during the life of the project.
AmLight will enhance global e-Science collaborations through distributed production peering fabrics, as well as any research and education networks present or future that connect to AtlanticWave or PacificWave. AmLight is a network architecture designed to support the needs of U.S.-Western Hemisphere research and education communities in a manner that supports the evolving nature of discovery and scholarship. The capacity and designs are based on collaborative funding over the five-year project plan, and are expected to evolve and continue to match the needs of the community.
Over 40 collaborations that include participants from the Americas are funded directly by NSF and encompass disciplines including physics, environmental science, oceanography, climate change, astronomy, and others. AmLight will serve as the foundational infrastructure to support these collaborations.
Intellectual Merit
AmLight is an approach to solve the problem of interconnecting not just the advanced networks, but the core communities and needs behind them in the Western Hemisphere. Today?s research is being adversely impacted by the lack of networking capacity to and from South America. AmLight provides the structure and the resources to empower researchers and educators. These successes present themselves qualitatively in the creation of geographically distributed research groups using the network, working groups formed through common interests developed on the network, and publications made possible through the network.
Broader Impact
As the network ties together more instruments and research groups at higher speeds, the result will be an increase in the rate of gathering, processing, and sharing data. This will produce an increase in the rate of discovery. The possible impact of this award touches on many areas of collaborative science and engineering. From biodiversity research that will identify specimens faster, to collaborative biomedical engineering that will discover drug treatments more quickly, to nuclear physicists. Scholarship in the Americas will improve through new opportunities for collaborative teaching, technology-augmented student mobility, and an infrastructure for inquiry-based learning. The AmLight project will allow U.S. classrooms to share a window to classrooms throughout the Western Hemisphere.
The NSF designates Hispanic Americans as a disadvantaged community. This infrastructure gives Hispanic Americans a new and unique advantage - the opportunity to leverage cultural and language commonalities with collaborators in Latin America to advance their pursuit of research and education in the US. This award will offer an advantage to not only the Hispanic populations throughout the US, but will cement collaborative relationships throughout the Americas.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
AmLight has served as an open instrument for collaboration, interconnecting existing points of aggregation, and providing a means to leverage collaborative purchasing and network operation in order to effectively maximize the benefits of all collaborators, and to manage the NSF investment in the context of international partnerships. This report summarizes the outcomes of the AmLight project.
AmLight was structured as three awards: a prime award, and two supplements. The prime award was in the Backbone category. The first supplement was the design and implementation of a hybrid network service that consisted of an advanced monitoring and reporting capability, adding to AmLight a Software Defined Networking (SDN) capability, and prototyping an OpenFlow traffic monitoring and reporting system. The second supplement was to deploy an unprecedented experimental 100G alien wave between the U.S. and Brazil, referred to as the OpenWave project.
By 2015, the AmLight backbone had evolved from three disjointed circuits that connected the U.S. to South America and Mexico, to two diverse 10Gbps rings that connected the U.S. to South America, with landings in Fortaleza, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Santiago, and also a 1Gbps network connection to Central America at Panama (see Figure 1). The outcome of the first supplement dramatically improved operations efficiency for AmLight by deploying OpenFlow-enabled switches on the AmLight backbone, and by AmLight evolving into an SDN network (see Figure 2). The provisioning of layer 2 circuits across multiple network domains was reduced from days to fewer than 5 minutes. The average number of emails exchanged between network engineers was reduced from 65 to 0. Results were published in the 14th IFIP/IEEE Symposiumwith presentation of an accepted academic paper “Benefits brought by the use of OpenFlow/SDN in the AmLight intercontinental research and education network”, which later on was granted “Best Experience Paper Award”.
AmLight established the South American Astronomy Coordination Committee (SAACC) to provide a venue for the U.S. astronomy community in Chile, and the AmLight network operators in South America for the exchange of information and coordination. The goals of the SAACC are to: (1) Bring these key US Astronomy (and Physics) users together to discuss the needs of this community in South America over the next 5,10,15,20 years. (2) Create a bridge between the US network planning (AmLight and partners), and the Regional Research and Education Networks (RENs). (3) Create a venue for international coordination of astronomical networking needs in the South American region. Figure 3 shows committee members and participants at a SAACC meeting at FIU.
A comprehensive report on the prime award and the two supplements was documented in the year 5 AmLight report, submitted prior to June 30, 2015. Starting July 1, 2015, AmLight was succeeded by the AmLight Express and Protect (AmLight-ExP) project, award# OAC-1451018. The remainder of this report describes the outcome of the OpenWave supplement.
OpenWave is an experiment to test a 100G alien wave end-to-end from São Paulo to Miami. NSF’s contribution to OpenWave funded a lease subcontract for the alien wave and salaries. The Academic Network of Sao Paulo (ANSP), partner in the OpenWave project, funded the equipment to activate the alien wave. The results of the experiment were to demonstrate how to overcome the nonlinear impairments on a production submarine cable system. The intellectual merit of OpenWave is the potential to effectively support the rapid growth of scientific data between North and South America by introducing a novel approach for upgrading production undersea optical fiber systems.
The results of the OpenWave experiment were incomplete for two reasons: First, the significant delay for funding of the optical equipment for OpenWave, and second, the bureaucratic delays for the export of the equipment. The funding was addressed and made available. The export of equipment will take more time to address. Once the equipment is deployed, the alien wave will be activated and used for experimentation. Our plan is to wait for the export issues to be resolved, and then execute the experiment. Our partner in Sao Paulo continues to monitor closely for a solution.
Last Modified: 10/01/2018
Modified by: Julio Ibarra
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