CC*DNI Networking Infrastructure: An SDN-enabled Genomics Research Infrastructure

The University of Kentucky’s Data Driven Network Infrastructure proposal builds on the success of the CC-NIE proposal titled CC-NIE Integration: Advanced Science through Next Generation SDN Networks. The initial award provided the University of Kentucky’s with the knowledge to design and manage SDN network to support data-intensive scientific research. The result of the grant was the successful implementation of a forty-gigabit SDN network to support researchers in Chemistry/Physics, Biology and Computer Science. The initial research focus was astrophysics, bio-medical, computer vision, virtualization and networking research. The University would like to expand the knowledge acquired in the implementation of the programmable SDN network to research problems to several campus entities including the College of Agriculture, the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Medicine, the College of Engineering and others as identified. In recent years at the University of Kentucky, multifaceted large scale data research has become more prominent and a focus area. Faculty from multiple colleges currently working on research in a variety of areas are creating ever-increasing demands for computation, storage, and network resources across the campus and in the cloud. This is creating new challenges for researchers who need to securely and efficiently access and work with their data. To address these emerging needs, we propose to build on our past work, creating a large scale, high speed, SDN network infrastructure that will provide researchers with the tools needed to move large complex data sets securely and efficiently between their research lab and campus computational and genomics research resources based on, or tailored to, the unique researcher requirements rather than general campus data transmission requirements. The grant will provide the necessary SDN distribution cores and interconnects needed to support these researchers and the buildings where research is being done. To provide enhanced access to national networks and cloud resources the University is upgrading its connection to Internet 2 to a 100 gigabits which will be tied into the proposed network infrastructure.