| NSF Org: |
OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | September 17, 2012 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | September 17, 2012 |
| Award Number: | 1245936 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| 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: | November 1, 2012 |
| End Date: | October 31, 2015 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $990,898.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $990,898.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
201 SIKES HALL CLEMSON SC US 29634-0001 (864)656-2424 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
300 Brackett Hall, Box 345702 Clemson SC US 29634-0001 |
| 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): |
Information Technology Researc, Campus Cyberinfrastructure |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| 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
Clemson Next-Net models a next-generation evolutionary campus network and services for productive and innovative research and education. The project builds upon existing work to expand Clemson's networking capabilities, enable Software Defined Networking (SDN) in at least 20 buildings on campus, and integrate high-speed campus research and education locations into the campus and national OpenFlow based infrastructure. The completed network extension will support significant new scientific research and education opportunities for multiple departments, colleges, and research groups across Clemson that require access to remote instruments and/or transfer large datasets. The project also facilitates future advances in Clemson?s networking infrastructure and its ability to connect to the national infrastructure.
The project provides a template for other universities who are planning similar campus network transformations and are working directly with Clemson on cross-campus projects in and beyond this project. Outreach, education, and training activities are also engaging faculty, students, and IT staff on campus and across campuses to leverage the created SDN network environment for their research, education, and operational needs. Such a quantum change in their perception of the networking and computing mechanism will provide users the basis and incentive to create new use cases with the technology.
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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.
In this project, Clemson University has extended its existing campus science DMZ gateway with an OpenFlow SDN based network called Clemson NextNet. Clemson NextNet is a 40/10 Gbps network spanning 20 academic buildings in parallel to the existing campus network, and it is acquired, deployed, and operated by the campus IT as a “pilot” for a future production SDN network with friction-free OpenFlow connections. In addition, the project explores the future process for operating and supporting such a SDN network to best benefit the university’s research and education mission. To that effect, the project assembled a SDN team as a partnership between IT network engineers and SDN researchers to support researchers’ use of the network in the example domains of bioinformatics, bioengineering (robotics surgery), and social media. Across these areas, the SDN team supported the prototyping, integration, trials, diagnostics, and performance engineering over Clemson and partners’ data center, campus, and wide area networks (Internet2 AL2S). The attached Figure 1 illustrates the Clemson NextNet topology.
In the bioinformatics/genomics domain, high throughput data transfer among Clemson, NIH and Utah was the main focus. The ability to transfer large DNA datasets in petabytes among remote data facilities is increasingly a must to support advanced multi-dataset genomics data analysis workflows. Significant network bottleneck analysis and optimization was performed by the SDN team and was published in various forums, including an Internet2 use case white paper. Significant effort was also devoted to transform a research prototype of OpenFlow-based high throughput data transfer solution called Steroid OpenFlow Service (SOS), originally derived from the NSF GENI project, into a production implementation for deployment across the partner sites. The efforts showed significant performance improvements possible and the quite involved knowledge needed in both network and server configuration tuning, and opportunities present in SDN based automation. This motivated the genomics community to initiate a multi-university project, “CIF21 DIBBS: Tripal Gateway, A Platform for Next-Generation Data Analysis and Sharing”, to explore a distributed data and workflow platform integrated with an intelligent network backend that can selectively invoke various network options, including such as SOS. Significant engineering efforts were needed to examine all involved devices to uncover/resolve a number of configuration and firmware bugs before the SOS can exhibit the intended behavior. The attached Figure 2 shows a systematic performance sweep with respect to the SOS buffer settings at both ends.
In the bioengineering domain, the potential of using SOS to facilitate real-time over-the-network medical imaging processing for the daVinci-S surgical system, transferring pre-processing video from the robot camera to a HPC center and post-processing video to an operating surgeon. The HPC processing aligns and annotates the real-time video with known landmarks of organs and vessels, etc., with respect to pre-surgery images to guide surgeons in more accurate operations. Figure 3 shows the work presented at Supercomputing 2015.
In addition to the research specific outcomes, the project brought valuable impacts to campus IT. Inspired by the successful research impact of the SDN team, the model was expanded to apply to all IT operational areas – the Clemson Center of Excellence for Next Generation Computing and Creativity was established and endorsed by the university as a university-wide resource for collaborative research, education, and training collaboration using advanced cyberinfrastructure and national partnerships.
This project was executed during the most fast-morphing time of SDN technology. Lessons learned about S...
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