NETWORKS

The University of Southern California’s Trojan Express Network II (TEN-II) has been honored by the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) as the recipient of the 2014 Innovations in Networking Award for Experimental/Developmental Applications.

The Trojan Express Network project (TEN-II), funded by the National Science Foundation, at the University of Southern California is deploying a research network, parallel to its existing “commodity” internet, that is designed to address the needs of researchers who need to transfer massive amounts of data between collaborators or between their laboratory and a computational facility—within their campuses, to national computational centers and data repositories, and to specialized equipment and facilities. As well as very large data transfers, high-definition visualization may also rely on real-time data transfers from similar facilities with data rates of hundreds of Megabits or Gigabits per second. Current campus networks and the general purpose Internet are not designed to deliver these data rates. National and Regional Research and Education Networks (RENs) such as Internet2 and CENIC have recognized these challenges and are deploying 100Gbps backbones that have the ability to dynamically allocate virtual circuits to support high data-rate flows.

As one of the first CENIC campuses to establish a 100-Gigabit connection to CENIC and Internet2′s Innovation platform, USC has created a “ScienceDMZ” to allow high-performance connections from its high-performance cluster and mass storage facilities to the national and international research network infrastructure. A variety of early tests determined the project’s viability and set the stage for further developments such as the expansion of the TEN-II infrastructure to several researchers facilities and laboratories. TEN-II is associated with the USC Center for High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) within the Information Technology Services (ITS) department.

Innovations in Networking Awards are given annually by CENIC to highlight exemplary innovations which leverage ultra high-bandwidth networking, particularly where those innovations have the potential to revolutionize the ways in which instruction and research are conducted or where they further the deployment of broadband in underserved areas.