| NSF Org: |
OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | June 15, 2020 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | June 15, 2020 |
| Award Number: | 2018308 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Deepankar Medhi
dmedhi@nsf.gov (703)292-2935 OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | October 1, 2020 |
| End Date: | September 30, 2024 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $514,208.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $514,208.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
1 NASSAU HALL PRINCETON NJ US 08544-2001 (609)258-3090 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
87 Prospect Ave Princeton NJ US 08544-2020 |
| 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): |
Special Projects - CNS, CISE Research Resources, 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
Future advances in scientific research will require computing on massive datasets and high bandwidth streaming scientific instrument data. New experimental research infrastructures will be required to advance the understanding of the networks capable of supporting these increasingly demanding science data flows. Testing advances in networking technologies and protocols with actual high-speed science data traffic is vital to networking experimenters, scientific instrument users, and data scientists. To address this need, this project will develop a prototype of a decentralized computing and networking system to create, collect and distribute a diverse collection of real and synthetic science traffic flows to the experimental research infrastructure user community. The proposed work will first develop and deploy the Science Traffic as a Service (STAAS) prototype on the Network Programming Initiative testbed connecting two US universities, and then prepare STAAS for later nationwide deployment on the FABRIC midscale networking research infrastructure now under development. The students exposed to research on networking testbeds with demanding science traffic workloads will learn skills to help strengthen a workforce prepared to advance the global-scale computing cloud application service platforms that are increasingly central to the US economy. All documents, software, presentations, and other artifacts created under this project will be made publicly available at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jbrassil/public/projects/staas/
The key project insight is that many science flows are already in transit at any moment on or between campuses. Using new campus cyberinfrstucture including passive optical Test Access Points, Network Packet Brokers, and data-plane programmable ethernet switches, STAAS will safely tap and forward copies of these flows onto the experimental testbed, while preserving both the timing integrity of the flows and the data privacy of their payloads. Large scale, high bandwidth experiments will be achieved by enlisting participation of many or all STAAS edge nodes on multiple campuses. By introducing a service-based model, STAAS can help advance the networking research community's transport of emerging science data, and help the operators of scientific instruments increase the amount and quality of data collected by their instruments.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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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.
As wide-area network backbone bandwidths have increased to terabit per second speeds over time it has been increasingly challenging for an individual computing and network systems researcher to generate large volumes of network traffic to study experimentally. This project investigated an approach to safely connect campus-based networking equipment to national testbeds such as the FABRIC computing and networking research infrastructure. This project developed the Science Traffic as a Service (STAAS) system, enabling geographically distributed campuses to cooperatively generate and forward realistic network traffic to shared testbeds for experimental study. Examples of supported network traffic types include live transmissions of public science datasets, streaming data from scientific laboratory instruments, as well as simulated traffic sources. Institutions participating in STAAS voluntarily offer administratively-approved network traffic to researchers on-demand. Each institution hosts a web portal that advertises its available traffic. By selecting and receiving traffic flows from multiple institutions simultaneously, an experimenter can construct a rich environment of test traffic flows to investigate when and where needed.
This project examined the performance of various computer networking technologies to generate, capture, manipulate and redirect live campus traffic flows. In a capstone demonstration, the prototype system at Princeton University was connected to the FABRIC infrastructure via a 100 Gigabit per second Facility Port, with all generated network traffic safely confined to an experiment container or slice. As a principal project outcome, the STAAS system demonstrated that the FABRIC research infrastructure need not develop a first-tier traffic service as an integral part of its testbed offering. Rather, this system could be safely constructed and operated by attached host institutions, reducing shared tested complexity and costs.
Internet-based platforms support many of the products and services that we use daily, including websites, e-commerce systems, and increasingly emerging artificial intelligence agents. These services generate enormous quantities of data that must flow over networks efficiently to achieve a desired user experience. The STAAS project has trained students to participate in a modern workforce capable of delivering these networked services efficiently. In addition, the project has provided investigators a new collection of tools to improve our understanding of the interactions and performance of network traffic flows at internet scale.
Last Modified: 01/16/2025
Modified by: John T Brassil
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