NSF Cyber Cluster
GRANT TO DEVELOP SHARABLE HIGH-PERFORMANCE CYBER CLUSTER DESIGNED TO DRIVE DATA AND COMPUTING INTENSIVE COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION
The very promise of ‘internet’ from its inception (ARPANET!) is the sharing of science computing resources. Professor Javed I. Khan, a researcher in intelligent cyber infrastructure, in the Department of Computer Science, and his team has just been awarded $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to design a new generation agile locally and globally sharable HPCC (High-Performance Computing Cluster). It will be integrated with national science computing facilities, including the Open Science Grid (OSG), by creatively using recent advances in federated science networking and distributed systems. The project has several notable features. Firstly, its design will support and study several interesting newly emerging collaborative science workflows- specially data lakes and real-time computing. This NSF-funded experimental facility will be technically designed to be seamlessly usable by faculty researchers from Kent and abroad, other Ohio colleges, as well as all Regional Campuses of Kent who are engaged in massive data-intensive collaborative science. This new system to be fronted by a 100-Gbps Data Transfer Node (DTN) facility capable of ‘friction-free’ long-haul transferring massive datasets recently commissioned by Khan’s team through another current NSF award. Khan said, “We are excited! As we enter into the era of intelligent cyber infrastructure, this work will be contributing to NSF’s goals to foster innovation, integration, and engineering of new campus-level networking and computing that can assertively support widely collaborative, cross-campus massive-data driven research”. The Cyber cluster will also harness unused compute cycles and resources across the global academic fabric. It is aimed to leverage a compelling set of science projects from a wide variety of disciplines.
Khan’s engineering team will be joined by some of top engineers from KSU’s Information Services divisions lead by Philip Thomas, OARnet (Ohio Advance Research Networks of Ohio), Open Science Grid team of University of Wisconsin, and EPOC-International Networks of Indiana University. For seamless sharing and unimpeded large data transfer the associated hardware will be in the Science.DMZ enclave directly connected to OARnet’s advanced optical network. “The Ohio Academic Resources Network (OARnet) is proud to support Kent State’s NSF CCI cluster research initiative, which will make excellent use of our statewide terabit-capable backbone and 400 Gbps connectivity to the Internet2 national research network”, said Pankaj Shah, CEO of OARnet. “It is great to work with advanced networking researchers and partner for new cyber infrastructure opportunities like this one”, said John Rathje, VP of Kent State Information Services. Khan is also serving as the chair of the Computer Science Department. An internationally active expert in cyber infrastructure, Khan has been massively funded and has contributed to the establishment of advance National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) in multiple counties in Asia and Africa.
More information about this project and research is available at http://medianet.kent.edu.
